But more oft, Those early days, we moved in charmed woods, Where once, at dusk, she piped against a faun, And one warm dawn a tree became a nymph Listening; and trembled; and Life laughed and passed. And once we came to a great stream that bore The stars upon its bosom like a sea, And ships like stars; so to the sea we came. And there she raised me to her lips, and sent One swift pang through me; then refrained her hand, And whispered: “Hear—” and into my frail flanks, Into my bursting veins, the whole sea poured Its spaces and its thunder; and I feared.
We came to cities, and Life piped on me Low calls to dreaming girls, In counting-house windows, through the chink of gold, Flung cries that fired the captive brain of youth, And made the heavy merchant at his desk Curse us for a cracked hurdy-gurdy; Life Mimicked the hurdy-gurdy, and we passed.
We climbed the slopes of solitude, and there Life met a god, who challenged her and said: “Thy pipe against my lyre!” But “Wait!” she laughed, And in my live flank dug a finger-hole, And wrung new music from it. Ah, the pain!
We climbed and climbed, and left the god behind. We saw the earth spread vaster than the sea, With infinite surge of mountains surfed with snow, And a silence that was louder than the deep; But on the utmost pinnacle Life again Hid me, and I heard the terror in her hair.
Safe in new vales, I ached for the old pang, And clamoured “Play me against a god again!” “Poor Marsyas-mortal—he shall bleed thee yet,” She breathed and kissed me, stilling the dim need. But evermore it woke, and stabbed my flank With yearnings for new music and new pain. “Another note against another god!” I clamoured; and she answered: “Bide my time. Of every heart-wound I will make a stop, And drink thy life in music, pang by pang, But first thou must yield the notes I stored in thee At dawn beside the river. Take my lips.”
She kissed me like a lover, but I wept, Remembering that high song against the god, And the old songs slept in me, and I was dumb.
We came to cavernous foul places, blind With harpy-wings, and sulphurous with the glare Of sinful furnaces—where hunger toiled, And pleasure gathered in a starveling prey, And death fed delicately on young bones.
“Now sing!” cried Life, and set her lips to me. “Here are gods also. Wilt thou pipe for Dis?” My cry was drowned beneath the furnace roar, Choked by the sulphur-fumes; and beast-lipped gods Laughed down on me, and mouthed the flutes of hell.
“Now sing!” said Life, reissuing to the stars; And wrung a new note from my wounded side.
So came we to clear spaces, and the sea. And now I felt its volume in my heart, And my heart waxed with it, and Life played on me The song of the Infinite. “Now the stars,” she said.
Then from the utmost pinnacle again She poured me on the wild sidereal stream, And I grew with her great breathings, till we swept The interstellar spaces like new worlds Loosed from the fiery ruin of a star.
Cold, cold we rested on black peaks again, Under black skies, under a groping wind; And Life, grown old, hugged me to a numb breast, Pressing numb lips against me. Suddenly A blade of silver severed the black peaks From the black sky, and earth was born again, Breathing and various, under a god’s feet. A god! A god! I felt the heart of Life Leap under me, and my cold flanks shook again. He bore no lyre, he rang no challenge out, But Life warmed to him, warming me with her, And as he neared I felt beneath her hands The stab of a new wound that sucked my soul Forth in a new song from my throbbing throat.
“His name—his name?” I whispered, but she shed The music faster, and I grew with it, Became a part of it, while Life and I Clung lip to lip, and I from her wrung song As she from me, one song, one ecstasy, In indistinguishable union blent, Till she became the flute and I the player. And lo! the song I played on her was more Than any she had drawn from me; it held The stars, the peaks, the cities, and the sea, The faun’s catch, the nymph’s tremor, and the heart Of dreaming girls, of toilers at the desk, Apollo’s challenge on the sunrise slope, And the hiss of the night-gods mouthing flutes of hell— All, to the dawn-wind’s whisper in the reeds, When Life first came, a shape of mystery, Moving among us, and with random stroke Severed, and rapt me from my silent tribe. All this I wrung from her in that deep hour, While Love stood murmuring: “Play the god, poor grass!”
Now, by that hour, I am a mate to thee Forever, Life, however spent and clogged, And tossed back useless to my native mud! Yea, groping for new reeds to fashion thee New instruments of anguish and delight, Thy hand shall leap to me, thy broken reed, Thine ear remember me, thy bosom thrill With the old subjection, then when Love and I Held thee, and fashioned thee, and made thee dance Like a slave-girl to her pipers—yea, thou yet Shalt hear my call, and dropping all thy toys Thou’lt lift me to thy lips, Life, and once more Pour the wild music through me—
VESALIUS IN ZANTE (See note at end)
(1564)
SET wide the window. Let me drink the day. I loved light ever, light in eye and brain— No tapers mirrored in long palace floors, Nor dedicated depths of silent aisles, But just the common dusty wind-blown day That roofs earth’s millions.
O, too long I walked In that thrice-sifted air that princes breathe, Nor felt the heaven-wide jostling of the winds And all the ancient outlawry of earth! Now let me breathe and see.
This pilgrimage They call a penance—let them call it that! I set my face to the East to shrive my soul Of mortal sin? So be it. If my blade Once questioned living flesh, if once I tore The pages of the Book in opening it, See what the torn page yielded ere the light Had paled its buried characters—and judge!
The girl they brought me, pinioned hand and foot In catalepsy—say I should have known That trance had not yet darkened into death, And held my scalpel. Well, suppose I knew? Sum up the facts—her life against her death. Her life? The scum upon the pools of pleasure Breeds such by thousands. And her death? Perchance The obolus to appease the ferrying Shade, And waft her into immortality. Think what she purchased with that one heart-flutter That whispered its deep secret to my blade! For, just because her bosom fluttered still, It told me more than many rifled graves; Because I spoke too soon, she answered me, Her vain life ripened to this bud of death As the whole plant is forced into one flower, All her blank past a scroll on which God wrote His word of healing—so that the poor flesh, Which spread death living, died to purchase life!
Ah, no! The sin I sinned was mine, not theirs. Not that they sent me forth to wash away— None of their tariffed frailties, but a deed So far beyond their grasp of good or ill That, set to weigh it in the Church’s balance, Scarce would they know which scale to cast it in. But I, I know. I sinned against my will, Myself, my soul—the God within the breast: Can any penance wash such sacrilege?
When I was young in Venice, years ago, I walked the hospice with a Spanish monk, A solitary cloistered in high thoughts, The great Loyola, whom I reckoned then A mere refurbisher of faded creeds, Expert to edge anew the arms of faith, As who should say, a Galenist, resolved To hold the walls of dogma against fact, Experience, insight, his own self, if need be! Ah, how I pitied him, mine own eyes set Straight in the level beams of Truth, who groped In error’s old deserted catacombs And lit his tapers upon empty graves! Ay, but he held his own, the monk—more man Than any laurelled cripple of the wars, Charles’s spent shafts; for what he willed he willed, As those do that forerun the wheels of fate, Not take their dust—that force the virgin hours, Hew life into the likeness of themselves And wrest the stars from their concurrences. So firm his mould; but mine the ductile soul That wears the livery of circumstance And hangs obsequious on its suzerain’s eye. For who rules now? The twilight-flitting monk, Or I, that took the morning like an Alp? He held his own, I let mine slip from me, The birthright that no sovereign can restore; And so ironic Time beholds us now Master and slave—he lord of half the earth, I ousted from my narrow heritage.
For there’s the sting! My kingdom knows me not. Reach