Twelve poems

by Edith Wharton

LA FOLLE DU LOGIS

Wild wingèd 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 even then

Expert to lift the latch of our low door

And profit by the hours when, dusked about

By human misintelligence, we made

Our first weak fledgling flights—

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 sea’s unalterable calm

That ever like a slow-swung mirror rocks

The balanced breasts of sea-birds....

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—till your touch

Has drawn me back to earth, as, in the dusk,

A scent of lilac from an unseen hedge

Bespeaks the hidden farm, the bedded cows,

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

And I have climbed with you by secret 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

Have seen the long grey waste where lonely thoughts

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 walk 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....

THE FIRST YEAR
[ALL SOULS’ DAY]

(i)

Here in my darkness

I lie in the depths of things,

As in a black wood whereof flowers and boughs are the roots,

And the moist-branching tendrils and ligaments,

Woven or spiralled or spreading, the roof of my head,

Blossomless, birdless, starless, skied with black earth,

A ponderous heaven.

But they forget,

Too often forget, and too soon, who above us

Brush the dead leaves from our mounds,

Scrape the moss from our names,

And feel safe,

They forget that one day in the year our earth becomes ether,

And the roots binding us loosen

As Peter’s chains dropped for the Angel,

In that old story they read there;

Forget—do they seek to remember?—

That one day in the year we are with them,

Rejoin them, hear them, behold them, and walk the old ways with them—

One!

To-morrow....

And already I feel

The harsh arms of ivy-coils loosening

Like a dead man’s embrace,

I feel the cool worms from my hair

Rain like dew,

And the soft-muzzled moles boring deeper,

Down after the old dead that stir not,

Or just grumble: “Don’t wake me,” and turn

The nether side of their skulls to their head-slab....

While I ... I their one-year neighbour,

Thrusting up like a willow in spring,

From my hair

Untwine the thick grass-hair carefully,

Unbind the cool roots from my lids,

Straining up, straining up with thin hands,

Scattering the earth like a cloud,

And stopping my ears from the cry,

Lower down,

Persistent, like a sick child’s wail,

The cry of the girl just below me:

“Don’t go, don’t go ...” the poor coward!

(ii)

How light the air is!

I’m dizzy ... my feet fly up ...

And this mad confusion of things topsy-turvey,

With the friendly comprehensible roots all hidden,

In this queer world where one can’t see how things happen,

But only what they become....

Was it always so queer and inexplicable?

Yes, but the fresh smell of things ...

Are these apples in the wet grass, I wonder?

Sweet, sweet, sweet, the smell of the living!

And the far-off sky, and the stars,

And the quiet spaces between,

So that one can float and fly ...

Why used we only to walk?

This is the gate—and the latch still unmended!

Yet how often I told him.... Ah, the scent of my box-border!

And a late clove-pink still unfrozen.

It’s what they call a “mild November” ...

I knew that, below there, by the way the roots kept pushing,

But I’d forgotten how tender it was on the earth ...

So quickly the dead forget!

And the living? I think, after all, they remember,

With everything about them so unchanged,

And no leaden loam on their eyes.

Yes, surely, I know he remembers;

Whenever he touches the broken latch,

He thinks: “How often she asked me,

And how careless I was not to mend it!”

And smiles and sighs; then recalls

How we planted the box-border together,

Knee to knee in the wet, one November ...

And the clove-pinks—

Here is the window.

They’ve put the green lamp on the table,

Where his books lie, heaped as of old—

Ah, thank God for the old disorder!

How I used to hate it, and now—

Now I could kiss the dust on the mirror, the pipe-ashes

Over everything—all the old mess

That no strange hand interferes with ...

Bless him for that!

(iij)

Just at first

This much contents me; why should I peer

Past the stripped arms of the rose, the metallic

Rattle of clematis dry as my hair,

There where June flushes and purples the window like sunset? I know

So well the room’s other corner: the hearth

Where autumn logs smoulder,

The hob,

The kettle, the crane, the cushion he put for my feet,

And my Chair—

O Chair, always mine!

Do I dare?

What—the room so the same, his and mine,

Not a book changed, the inkstand uncleaned,

The old pipe-burn scarring the table,

The old rent in the rug, where I tripped

And he caught me—no woman’s hand here

Has mended or marred; all’s the same!

Why not dare, then? Oh, but to think,

If I stole to my chair, if I sat there,

Feet folded, arms stretched on the arms,

So quiet,

And waited for night and his coming ...

Oh, think, when he came

And sank in the other chair, facing me,

Not a line of his face would alter,

Nor his hands fall like sun on my hair,

Nor the old dog jump on me, grinning

Yet cringing, because she half-knew

I’d found out the hole in my border,

And why my tallest auratum was dead—

But his face would be there, unseeing,

His eyes look through me;

And the old dog—not pausing

At her bowl for a long choking drink,

Or to bite the burrs from her toes, and stretch

Sideward to the fire, dreaming over their tramp in the stubble—

Would creep to his feet

Bristling a little ...

And I,

I should be there, in the old place,

All the old life bubbling up in me,

And to him no more felt than the sap

Struggling up unseen in the clematis—

Ah, then, then, then I were dead!

But what was I, then? Lips and hands only—

Since soul cannot reach him without them?

Oh, heavy grave of the flesh,

Did I never once reach to him through you?

I part the branches and look....

(iv)

O my Chair ...

But who sits in you? One like me

Aflame yet invisible!

Only I, with eyes death-anointed,

Can see her young hair, and the happy heart riding

The dancing sea of her breast!

Then she too is waiting—

And young as I was?

Was she always there?

Were her lips between all our kisses?

Did her hands know the folds of his hair?

Did she hear what I said when I loved him?

Was the room never empty? Not once?

When I leaned in that chair, which one of us two did he see?

Did he feel us both on his bosom?

How strange! If I spoke to her now she would hear me,

She alone ...

Would tell me all, through her weeping,

Or rise up and curse me, perhaps—

As I might her, were she living!

But since she is dead, I will go—

Go home, and leave them together ...

I will go back to my dungeon,

Go back, and never return;

Lest another year, in my chair,

I find one sitting,

One whom he sees, and the old dog fears not, but springs on ...

I will not suffer what she must have suffered, but creep

To my bed in the dark,

And mind how the girl below called to me,

Called up through the mould and the grave-slabs:

“Do not go! Do not go! Do not go!”