MISTRAL IN THE MAQUIS
Roofed in with creaking pines we lie
And see the waters burn and whiten,
The wild seas race the racing sky,
The tossing landscape gloom and lighten.
With emerald streak and silver blotch
The white wind paints the purple sea.
Warm in our hollow dune we watch
The honey-orchis nurse the bee.
Gold to the keel the startled boats
Beat in on palpitating sail,
While overhead with many throats
The choral forest hymns the gale.
’Neath forest-boughs the templed air
Hangs hushed as when the Host is lifted,
While, flanks astrain and rigging bare,
The last boat to the port has drifted....
Nought left but the lost wind that grieves
On darkening seas and furling sails,
And the long light that Beauty leaves
Upon her fallen veils....
LES SALETTES
[December 1923]
Let all my waning senses reach
To clasp again that secret beach,
Pine-roofed and rock-embrasured, turned
To where the winter sunset burned
Beyond a purpling dolphin-cape
On charmèd seas asleep....
Let every murmur, every shape,
Fanned by that breathing hour’s delight,
Against the widening western deep
Hold back the hour, hold back the night....
For here, across the molten sea,
From golden islands lapped in gold,
Come all the shapes that used to be
Part of the sunset once to me,
And every breaker’s emerald arch
Bears closer their ethereal march,
And flings its rose and lilac spray
To dress their brows with scattered day.
As trooping shoreward, one by one,
Swift in the pathway of the sun,
With lifted arms and eyes that greet,
The lost years hasten to my feet.
All is not pain, their eyes declare;
The shoreward ripples are their voice,
The sunset, streaming through their hair,
Coils round me in a fiery flood,
And all the sounds of that rich air
Are in the beating of my blood,
Crying: Rejoice, rejoice, rejoice!
Rejoice, because such skies are blue,
Each dawn, above a world so fair,
Because such glories still renew
To transient eyes the morning’s hue.
Such buds on every fruit-tree smile,
Such perfumes blow on every gale,
Such constellated hangings veil
The outer emptiness awhile;
And these frail senses that were thine,
Because so frail, and worn so fine,
Are as a Venice glass, wherethrough
Life’s last drop of evening wine
Shall like a draught of morning shine.
The glories go; their footsteps fade
Into an all-including shade,
And isles and sea and clouds and coasts
Wane to an underworld of ghosts.
But as I grope with doubtful foot
By myrtle branch and lentisk root
Up the precipitous pine-dark way,
Through fringes of the perished day
Falters a star, the first alight,
And threaded on that tenuous ray
The age-long promise reappears,
And life is Beauty, fringed with tears.
DIEU D’AMOUR
[A CASTLE IN CYPRUS]
Beauty hath two great wings
That lift me to her height,
Though steep her secret dwelling clings
’Twixt earth and light.
Thither my startled soul she brings
In a murmur and stir of plumes,
And blue air cloven,
And in aerial rooms
Windowed on starry springs
Shows me the singing looms
Whereon her worlds are woven;
Then, in her awful breast,
Those heights descending,
Bears me, a child at rest,
At the day’s ending,
Till earth, familiar as a nest,
Again receives me,
And Beauty veiled in night,
Benignly bending,
Drops from the sinking west
One feather of our flight,
And on faint sandals leaves me.