Edith Wharton's Verse, 1879-1919, from various journals.

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Edith Wharton's Verse, 1879-1919, from various journals. Page 7

by Edith Wharton


  Or in yet deeper hours, when all was still,

  And the hushed air bowed over them alone,

  Such music of the heart as lovers hear,

  When close as lips lean, lean the thoughts between--

  When the cold world, no more a lonely orb

  Circling the unimagined track of Time,

  Is like a beating heart within their hands,

  A numb bird that they warm, and feel its wings--

  Such music have I heard; and through the prayers

  Wherewith I sought to shackle their desires,

  And bring them humbled to the feet of God,

  Caught the loud quiring of the fruitful year,

  The leap of springs, the throb of loosened earth,

  And the sound of all the streams that seek the sea.

  So fell it, that when pity moved their hearts,

  And those high lovers, one unto the end,

  Bowed to the sundering will, and each his way

  Went through a world that could not make them twain,

  Knowing that a great vision, passing by,

  Had swept mine eye-lids with its fringe of fire,

  I, with the wonder of it on my head,

  And with the silence of it in my heart,

  Forth to Tintagel went by secret ways,

  A long lone journey; and from them that loose

  Their spiced bales upon the wharves, and shake

  Strange silks to the sun, or covertly unbosom

  Rich hoard of pearls and amber, or let drip

  Through swarthy fingers links of sinuous gold,

  Chose their most delicate treasures. Though I knew

  No touch more silken than this knotted gown,

  My hands, grown tender with the sense of her,

  Discerned the airiest tissues, light to cling

  As shower-loosed petals, veils like meadow-smoke,

  Fur soft as snow, amber like sun congealed,

  Pearls pink as may-buds in an orb of dew;

  And laden with these wonders, that to her

  Were natural as the vesture of a flower,

  Fared home to lay my booty at her feet.

  And she, consenting, nor with useless words

  Proving my purpose, robed herself therein

  To meet her lawful lord; but while she thus

  Prisoned the wandering glory of her hair,

  Dimmed her bright breast with jewels, and subdued

  Her light to those dull splendours, well she knew

  The lord that I adorned her thus to meet

  Was not Tintagel’s shadowy King, but he,

  That other lord beneath whose plumy feet

  The currents of the seas of life run gold

  As from eternal sunrise; well she knew

  That when I laid my hands upon her head,

  Saying, "Fare forth forgiven," the words I spoke

  Were the breathings of his pity, who beholds

  How, swept on his inexorable wings

  Too far beyond the planetary fires

  On the last coasts of darkness, plunged too deep

  In light ineffable, the heart amazed

  Swoons of its glory, and dropping back to earth

  Craves the dim shelter of familiar sounds,

  The rain on the roof, the noise of flocks that pass,

  And the slow world waking to its daily round. . . .

  And thus, as one who speeds a banished queen,

  I set her on my mule, and hung about

  With royal ornament she went her way;

  For meet it was that this great Queen should pass

  Crowned and forgiven from the face of Love.

  "The Comrade." Atlantic Monthly 106 (Dec. 1910): 785-87.

  WILD winged thing, O brought I know not whence

  To beat your life out in my life’s low cage;

  You strange familiar, nearer than my flesh

  Yet distant as a star, that were at first

  A child with me a child, yet elfin-far,

  And visibly of some unearthly breed;

  Mirthfullest mate of all my mortal games,

  Yet shedding on them some evasive gleam

  Of Latmian loneliness--O seven then

  Expert to lift the latch of our low door

  And profit by the hours when, dusked about

  By human misintelligence, our first

  Weak fledgling flights were safeliest essayed;

  Divine accomplice of those perilous-sweet

  Low moth-flights of the unadventured soul

  Above the world’s dim garden!--now we sit,

  After what stretch of years, what stretch of wings,

  In the same cage together--still as near

  And still as strange!

  Only I know at last

  That we are fellows till the last night falls,

  And that I shall not miss your comrade hands

  Till they have closed my lids, and by them set

  A taper that--who knows!--may yet shine through.

  Sister, my comrade, I have ached for you,

  Sometimes, to see you curb your pace to mine,

  And bow your Maenad crest to the dull forms

  Of human usage; I have loosed your hand

  And whispered: ’Go! Since I am tethered here;’

  And you have turned, and breathing for reply,

  ’I too am pinioned, as you too are free,’

  Have caught me to such undreamed distances

  As the last planets see, when they look forth,

  To the sentinel pacings of the outmost stars--

  Nor these alone,

  Comrade, my sister, were your gifts. More oft

  Has your impalpable wing-brush bared for me

  The heart of wonder in familiar things,

  Unroofed dull rooms, and hung above my head

  The cloudy glimpses of a vernal moon,

  Or all the autumn heaven ripe with stars.

  And you have made a secret pact with Sleep,

  And when she comes not, or her feet delay,

  Toiled in low meadows of gray asphodel

  Under a pale sky where no shadows fall,

  Then, hooded like her, to my side you steal,

  And the night grows like a great rumouring sea,

  And you a boat, and I your passenger,

  And the tide lifts us with an indrawn breath

  Out, out upon the murmurs and the scents,

  Through spray of splintered star-beams, or white rage

  Of desperate moon-drawn waters--on and on

  To some blue ocean immarcescible

  That ever like a slow-swung mirror rocks

  The balanced breasts of sea-birds motionless.

  Yet other nights, my sister, you have been

  The storm, and I the leaf that fled on it

  Terrifically down voids that never knew

  The pity of creation--or have felt

  The immitigable anguish of a soul

  Left last in a long-ruined world alone;

  And then your touch has drawn me back to earth,

  As in the night, upon an unknown road,

  A scent of lilac breathing from the hedge

  Bespeaks the hidden farm, the bedded cows,

  And safety, and the sense of human kind . . .

  And I have climbed with you by hidden ways

  To meet the dews of morning, and have seen

  The shy gods like retreating shadows fade,

  Or on the thymy reaches have surprised

  Old Chiron sleeping, and have waked him not . . .

  Yet farther have I fared with you, and known

  Love and his sacred tremors, and the rites

  Of his most inward temple; and beyond

  His temple lights, have seen the long gray waste

  Where lonely thoughts, like creatures of the night,

  Listen and wander where a city stood.

  And creeping down by waterless defiles

  Under an
iron midnight, have I kept

  My vigil in the waste till dawn began

  To move among the ruins, and I saw

  A sapling rooted in a fissured plinth,

  And a wren’s nest in the thunder-threatening hand

  Of some old god of granite in the dust . . .

  "Summer Afternoon (Bodiam Castle, Sussex)." Scribner’s Magazine 49 (Mar. 1911): 277-78. Edith Wharton

  NOT all the wasteful beauty of the year

  Heaped in the scale of one consummate hour

  Shall this outweigh: the curve of quiet air

  That held, as in the green sun-fluted light

  Of sea-caves quivering in a tidal lull,

  Those tranced towers and long unruined walls,

  Moat-girdled from the world’s dissolving touch,

  The rook-flights lessening over evening woods,

  And, down the unfrequented grassy slopes,

  The shadows of old oaks contemplative

  Reaching behind them like the thoughts of age.

  High overhead hung the long Sussex ridge,

  Sun-cinctured, as a beaker’s rim of gold

  Curves round its green concavity; and slow

  Across the upper pastures of the sky

  The clouds moved white before the herding airs

  That in the hollow, by the moated walls,

  Stirred not one sleeping lily from its sleep.

  Deeper the hush fell; more remote the earth

  Fled onward with the flight of cloud and sun,

  And cities strung upon the flashing reel

  Of nights and days. We knew no more of these

  Than the grey towers redoubling in the moat

  The image of a bygone strength transformed

  To beauty’s endless uses; and like them

  We felt the touch of that renewing power

  That turns the landmarks of man’s ruined toil

  To high star-haunted reservoirs of peace.

  And with that sense there came the deeper sense

  Of moments that, between the beats of time,

  May thus insphere in some transcendent air

  The plenitude of being.

  Far currents feed them, from those slopes of soul

  That know the rise and set of other stars

  White-roaring downward through remote defiles

  Dim-forested with unexplored thought;

  Yet tawny from the flow of lower streams

  That drink the blood of battle, sweat of earth,

  And the broached vats of cities revelling.

  All these the moments hold; yet these resolved

  To such clear wine of beauty as shall flush

  The blood to richer living. . . . Thus we mused,

  And musing thus we felt the magic touch,

  And such a moment held us. As, at times,

  Through the long windings of each other’s eyes

  We have reached some secret hallowed silent place

  That a god visits at the turn of night--

  In such a solitude the moment held us.

  And one were thought and sense in that profound

  Submersion of all being deep below

  The vexed waves of action. Clear we saw,

  Through the clear nether stillness of the place,

  The gliding images of words and looks

  Swept from us down the gusty tides of time,

  And here unfolding to completer life;

  And like dull pebbles from a sunless shore

  Plunged into crystal waters, suddenly

  We took the hues of beauty, and became,

  Each to the other, all that each had sought.

  Thus did we feel the moment and the place

  One in the heart of beauty; while far off

  The rooks’ last cry died on the fading air,

  And the first star stood white upon the hill.

  "Pomegranate Seed." Scribner’s Magazine 51 (Mar. 1912): p284-91. BY EDITH WHARTON

  DEMETER PERSEPHONE

  HECATE HERMES

  In the vale of Elusis

  Hail, goddess, from the midmost caverned vale

  Of Samothracia, where with darksome rites

  Unnameable, and sacrificial lambs,

  Pale priests salute thy triple-headed form,

  Borne hither by swift Hermes o’er the sea:

  Hail, Hecate, what word soe’er thou bring

  To me, undaughtered, of my vanished child.

  Word have I, but no Samothracian wild

  Last saw me, and mine aged footsteps pine

  For the bleak vale, my dusky-pillared house,

  And the cold murmur of incessant rites

  Forever falling down mine altar-steps

  Into black pools of fear . . . for I am come

  Even now from that blue-cinctured westward isle,

  Trinacria, where, till thou withheldst thy face,

  Yearly three harvests yellowed to the sun,

  And vines deep-laden yoked the heavier boughs--

  Trinacria, that last saw Persephone.

  Now, triune goddess, may the black ewe-lambs

  Pour a red river down thine altar-steps,

  Fruit, loaves and honey, at the cross-roads laid,

  With each young moon by pious hands renewed,

  Appease thee, and the Thracian vale resound

  With awful homage to thine oracle!

  What bring’st thou of Persephone, my child?

  Thy daughter lives, yet never sees the sun.

  Blind am I in her blindness. Tell no more.

  Blind is she not, and yet beholds no light.

  Dark as her doom is, are thy words to me.

  When the wild chariot of the flying sea

  Bore me to Etna, ’neath his silver slope

  Herding their father’s flocks three maids I found,

  The daughters of the god whose golden house

  Rears in the east its cloudy peristyle.

  "Helios, our father," to my quest they cried,

  "Was last to see Persephone on earth."

  On earth? What nameless region holds her now?

  Even as I put thy question to the three,

  Etna became as one who knows a god,

  And wondrously, across the waiting deep,

  Wave after wave the golden portent bore,

  Till Helios rose before us.

  O, I need

  Thy words as the parched valleys need my rain!

  May the draught slake thee! Thus the god replied:

  When the first suns of March with verdant flame

  Relume the fig-trees in the crannied hills,

  And the pale myrtle scents the rain-washed air--

  Ere oleanders down the mountain stream

  Pass the wild torch of summer, and my kine

  Breathe of gold gorse and honey-laden sage;

  Between the first white flowering of the bay

  And the last almond’s fading from the hill,

  Along the fields of Enna came a maid

  Who seemed among her mates to move alone,

  As the full moon will mow the sky of stars,

  And whom, by that transcendence, I divined

  Of breed Olympian, and Demeter’s child.

  All-seeing god! So walks she in my dreams.

  Persephone (so spake the god of day)

  Ran here and there with footsteps that out-shone

  The daffodils she gathered, while her maids,

  Like shadows of herself by noon fore-shortened,

  On every side her laughing task prolonged;

  When suddenly the warm and trusted earth

  Widened black jaws beneath them, and therefrom

  Rose Aides, whom with averted head

  Pale mortals worship, as the poplar turns,

  Whitening, her fearful foliage from the gale.

  Like thunder rolling up against the wind

  He dusked the sky with midnight ere he came,

  Whirling his cloak of
subterraneous cloud

  In awful coils about the fated maid,

  Till nothing marked the place where she had stood

  But her dropped flowers--a garland on a grave.

  Where is that grave? There will I lay me down,

  And know no more the change of night to day.

  Such is the cry that mortal mothers make;

  But the sun rises, and their task goes on.

  Yet happier they, that make an end at last.

  Behold, along the Eleusinian vale

  A god approaches, by his feathered tread

  Arcadian Hermes. Wait upon his word.

  I am a god. What do the gods avail?

  Oft have I heard that cry--but not the answer.

  Demeter, from Olympus am I come,

  By laurelled Tempe and Thessalian ways,

  Charged with grave words of aegis-bearing Zeus.

  DEMETER

  ( as if she has not heard him)

  If there be any grief I have not borne,

  Go, bring it here, and I will give it suck . . .

  Thou art a god, and speakest mortal words?

  Even the gods grow greater when they love.

  It is the Life-giver who speaks by me.

  I want no words but those my child shall speak.

  His words are winged seeds that carry hope

  To root and ripen in long-barren hearts.

  Deeds, and not words, alone can quicken me.

  His words are fruitfuller than deeds of men.

  Why hast thou left Olympus, and thy kind?

  Because my kind are they that walk the earth

  For numbered days, and lay them down in graves.

  My sisters are the miserable women

  Who seek their children up and down the world,

  Who feel a babe’s hand at the faded breast,

  And live upon the words of lips gone dumb.

  Sorrow no footing on Olympus finds,

  And the gods are gods because their hearts forget.

  Why then, since thou hast cast thy lot with those

  Who painfully endure vain days on earth,

  Hast thou, harsh arbitress of fruit and flower,

  Cut off the natural increase of the fields?

  The baffled herds, tongues lolling, eyes agape,

  Range wretchedly from sullen spring to spring,

  A million sun-blades lacerate the ground,

  And the shrunk fruits untimely drop, like tears

  That Earth at her own desolation sheds.

  These are the words Zeus bids me bring to thee.

  To whom reply: No pasture longs for rain

  As for Persephone I thirst and hunger.

  Give me my child, and all the earth shall laugh

  Like Rhodian rose-fields in the eye of June.

  What if such might were mine? What if, indeed,

 

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