class="c4" id="pgepubid00018">II

Beneath a vineyard ruinous
And a broken-columned temple
They are delving where she sleeps!
There between a lonely valley
Filled with noonday silences
And the headlands of soft violet
Where the sapphire seas still whisper,
Whisper with her sigh;
Through a country sad with wonder
Men are seeking vanished Sappho,
Men are searching for the tomb
Of muted Song!

III

They will find a Something there,
In a cavern where no sound is,
In a room of milky marble
Walled with black amphibolite
Over-scored with faded words
And stained with time!

IV

Sleeping in a low-roofed chamber,
With her phials of perfume round her,
In a terra-cotta coffin
With her image on the cover,
Childish echo of her beauty
Etched in black and gold barbaric—
Lift it slowly, slowly, seekers,
Or your search will end in dust!

V

With a tiny nude Astarte,
Bright with gilt and gravely watching
Over grass-green malachite,
Over rubies pale, and topaz,
And the crumbled dust of pearls!

VI

With her tarnished silver mirror,
With her rings of beaten gold,
With her robes of faded purple,
And the stylus that so often
Traced the azure on her eyelids,—
Eyelids delicate and weary,
Drooping, over-wise!
And at her head will be a plectron
Made of ivory, worn with time,
And a flute and gilded lyre
Will be found beside her feet,
And two little yellow sandals,
And crude serpents chased in silver
On her ankle rings—
And a cloud of drifting dust
All her shining hair!

VII

In that lost and lonely tomb
They may find her;
Find the arms that ached with rapture,
Softly folded on a breast
That for evermore is silent;
Find the eyes no longer wistful,
Find the lips no longer singing,
And the heart, so hot and wayward
When that ashen land was young,
Cold through all the mists of time,
Cold beneath the Lesbian marble
In the low-roofed room
That drips with tears!

THE WILD SWANS PASS

In the dead of the night
You turned in your troubled sleep
As you heard the wild swans pass;
And then you slept again.

You slept—
While a new world swam beneath
That army of eager wings,
While plainland and slough and lake
Lay wide to those outstretched throats,
While the far lone Lights allured
That phalanx of passionate breasts.

And I who had loved you more
Than a homing bird loves flight,—
I watched with an ache for freedom,
I rose with a need for life,
Knowing that love had passed
Into its unknown North!

AT NOTRE DAME

I

O odour of incense, pride of purple and gold,
Burst of music and praise, and passion of flute and pipe!
O voices of silver o'er-sweet, and soothing antiphonal chant!
O Harmony, ancient, ecstatic, a-throb to the echoing roof,
With tremulous roll of awakened reverberant tubes, and thunder of sound!
And illusion of mystical song and outclangour of jubilant bell,
And glimmer of gold and taper, and throbbing, insistent pipe—
If song and emotion and music were all—
Were it only all!

II

For see, dark heart of mine,
How the singers have ceased and gone!
See, how all of the music is lost and the lights are low,
And how, as our idle arms, these twin ineloquent towers
Grope up through the old inaccessible Night to His stars!
How in vain we have stormed on the bastions of Silence with sound!
How in vain with our music and song and emotion assailed the Unknown,
How beat with the wings of our worship on Earth's imprisoning bars!
For the pinions of Music have wearied, the proud loud tubes have tired,
Yet still grim and taciturn stand His immutable stars,
And, lost in the gloom, to His frontiers old I turn
Where glimmer those sentinel fires,
Beyond which, Dark Heart, we two
Some night must steal us forth,
Quite naked, and alone!

THE PILOT

I lounge on the deck of the river-steamer,
Homeward bound with its load,
Churning from headland to headland,
Through moonlight and silence and dusk.
And the decks are alive with laughter and music and singing,
And I see the forms of the sleepers
And the shadowy lovers that lean so close to the rail,
And the romping children behind,
And the dancers amidships.
But high above us there in the gloom,
Where the merriment breaks like a wave at his feet,
Unseen of lover and dancer and me,
Is the Pilot, impassive and stern,
With his grim eyes watching the course.

DOORS

Listen!
Footsteps
Are they,
That falter through the gloom,
That echo through the lonely chambers
Of our house of life?

Listen!
Did a door close?
Did a whisper waken?
Did a ghostly something
Sigh across the dusk?

From the mournful silence
Something, something went!
Far down some shadowy passage
Faintly closed a door—
And O how empty lies
Our house of life!

SPRING FLOODS

You stood alone
In the dusky window,
Watching the racing river.
Touched with a vague unrest,
And if tired of loving too much
More troubled at heart to find
That the flame of love could wither
And the wonder of love could pass,
You kneeled at the window-ledge
And stared through the black-topped maples
Where an April robin fluted,—
Stared idly out
At the flood-time sweep of the river,
Silver and paling gold
In the ghostly April twilight.

Shadowy there in the dusk
You watched with shadowy eyes
The racing, sad, unreasoning
Hurrying torrent of silver
Seeking its far-off sea.
Faintly I heard you sigh,
And faintly I heard the robin's flute,
And faintly from rooms remote
Came a broken murmur of voices.
And life, for a breath, stood bathed
In a wonder crowned with pain,
And immortal the moment hung;
And I know that the thought of you
There at the shadowy window,
And the matted black of the maples,
And the sunset call of a bird,
And the sad wide reaches of silver,
Will house in my haunted heart
Till the end of Time!

THE TURN OF THE YEAR

The pines shake and the winds wake,
And the dark waves crowd the sky-line!
The birds wheel out on a troubled sky;
The widening road runs white and long,
And the page is turned,
And the world is tired!

So I want no more of twilight sloth,
And I want no more of resting,
And of all the earth I ask no more
Than the green sea, the great sea,
The long road, the white road,
And a change of life