THE HOUSE OF ORCHIDS
AND OTHER POEMS
THE HOUSE OF ORCHIDS
AND OTHER POEMS
BY
GEORGE STERLING
Author of “The Testimony of the Suns”
and “A Wine of Wizardry”
A. M. ROBERTSON
SAN FRANCISCO
1911
COPYRIGHT
1911
BY GEORGE STERLING
Printed by
The Stanley-Taylor Company
San Francisco
TO MY WIFE
CONTENTS
DUANDON
Duandon, king of Aetria’s farthest bound
And lord of isles the sea is loud around,
Beheld the crimson fountains of the dawn
Bear up the lark, a foam of song, till drawn
By some new sorrow in the ocean’s tone,
Thither he fared, expectant and alone.
Thither he fared, fresh from the sea of sleep,
And all the balmy land was blossomed deep,
Nor could one wander save on helpless flow’rs,
Where Summer made a garland of the hours
And bound it on the dew-dipt brow of Morn,
Bent low above the meadow’s blossom-bourn.
But past all peace of bowers rang the call
And invocation of the billows’ fall,
And, clean from kingdoms of the sapphire vast,
The winds of ocean smote his brow at last.
Afar he saw the eddying petrel sweep
O’er reefs where hoarser roared the thwarted deep,
And soon before his eyes, exultant, fain,
Heavy with azure gleamed the investing main,
And quick with pulsings of a distant storm,
Strong as that music floating Troy to form.
Splendid the everlasting ocean shone
As God’s blue robe upon a desert thrown;
Landward he saw the sea-born breakers fare,
Young as a wind and ancient as the air;
August he saw the unending ranks uproll,
With joy and wonder mastering the soul,
With marvel on the hearing and the sight—
Green fires, and billows tremulous with light,
With shaken soul of light and shuddering blaze
Of leaping emerald and cold chrysoprase,—
The surge and suspiration of the sea,
Great waters choral of eternity,—
The mighty dirge that will not cease for day
Nor all the stars’ invincible array,—
The thunder that hath set, since Time began,
Its sorrow in the lonely heart of man.
Long stood the king before that wide review,
Divining, deep beyond its sound and hue,
Unfathomable mystery and dream,—
Rapture and woe illusive but supreme;
And as the pine against the sea-wind sighs,
So thrilled his breast with whispers and surmise;
Till, on a beach that only he might roam,
The sea, from broadest tapestries of foam,
From mighty looms immaculate and cold,
A scarlet shell before his feet uprolled.
Wet as with blood against the dawn it flamed,
Deep-whorled and irised, lustrous and unnamed—
A jewel of the sea that burned and shone
Like some king-ruby ravished from a throne.
And long Duandon wandered, all-amazed,
And long upon the shell’s wild beauty gazed,
Till, half-unwitting, swiftly to his ear
He held it, fain as any child to hear
That echo like the murmuring of seas—
Astray forever on a mournful breeze
And borne from some remote, nocturnal bound;
Whereat a voice, in sorceries of sound
To which the grace of vanished lyres had clung,
Sang from the shell as never voice hath sung:
Far down, where virgin silence reigns,
In jasper evenings of the sea,
I toss my pearls, I wait for thee.
The sea hath lent me all its stains:
It is but treasure-house of me.
The corals of the deep have caught
A Titan shell whose fragile dome
Is crimson o’er mine ocean home—
Mine opal chambers subtly wrought
In semblance of the shaken foam.
Oh, come! and thou shalt dream with me
By violet foam at twilight tost
On strands of ocean islets lost
To prows that seek them wearily,
O’er seas by questing sunsets crost.
All dreams that Hope hath promised Love,
All beauty thou hast sought in vain,
All joy held once and lost again,
These, and the mystery thereof,
I guard beneath the sundering main.
So rang that crystal cry, as from afar,
Clear as the voice of Heaven’s whitest star,
And strong Duandon pondered, with his gaze
Set like twin stars above those azure ways.
Keener his heart, a plummet, yearned to sound
The gulf that held his soul amazed and bound,
Where, darker for the sky’s unclouded dome,
The waves took sudden coronals of foam,
Till half he deemed he saw, far out, the white
Flung arms and bosom of the ocean-sprite.
Hour beyond hour, until the sun was fled,
Strode he on sands that none but he might tread;
Hour beyond hour one sight his vision drank—
A foam-white arm that beckoned once, and sank.
Then, wave to wave in deeper anthems roared,
And realm by realm the belted sunset soared,
As tho’ a city of the Titans burned
In lands below the sea-line, undiscerned,
Till desolation touched it, zone by zone,
Its splendors gone, like jewels turned to stone,
And sad with evening sang the ocean-choirs,
Domed by the stars’ imperishable fires.
But still Duandon lingered on the sands
And clasped the shell with indecisive hands;
Ghostly it gleamed, nor music would outpour
Save of the sea on some disastrous shore.
And still he stood, and listened but to hark
The surf, like dragons battling in the dark;
Implacable they ravened, ere the moon,
A towering glory on the eastern dune,
A frozen splendor on the seething strand,
In silver webs had snared the sea and land.
Then, as on hostile waves her arrows leapt,
Duandon turned him from the sea, and slept.
Slept, but the morning found him yet again
A lonely searcher of the lonelier main;
And night by night, and day by barren day,
Silent he stood before the waves’ array—
The victim of an unrelenting strife
Of joy with death, of love with love of life.
Ever at dawn the voice from out the shell
Renewed within his heart the siren’s spell;
Ever the wild, enchanting melody
Rang as the sun was wedded to the sea.
And still the royal pageant of the world
Before his doom-bewildered eyes unfurled,
With dusky stain of sunsets northward drawn
And cloudy headlands of the coasts of dawn.
Beyond that realm of jade and jade-bound bays,
He saw the sapphire fields of ocean blaze;
Heard the alliant waters chant their rune
Before the turquoise battlements of noon,
Where evening armies of the mist would roam
As twilight mixed its purple with the foam,—
Where sunlight, checked in its torrential leap,
Would froth at dawn about some cloudland steep.
Debarred was peace, tho’ Sleep, with tender hand,
Led him awhile in her allaying land;
For soon the sea flowed in upon his dream
And far below he saw the Singer gleam—
Her floating hair and pearly body’s grace,
With sunken moonlight pure upon her face.
So still he yearned, on whom her spell was laid,
And ever sunset, like a golden blade,
Cut day by day from life, and ever he
Heard like the voice of Death the lordly sea,
Chanting, enthroned on choric reef and bars,
Its midnight song below the western stars,
And all the stars seemed ministrant to doom
As high Orion trod his arc of gloom.
Broke then a morning when the weary sea
Lay husht above its halls of mystery;
Besieging fog hung mute on shore and vale,
With pallid banners and with ashen mail,
And ocean, grey as with oblivion,
Lay hidden from the visage of the sun.
High noon drave not the phantom army forth,
Nor winds slow-seeping from the muffled North,
And weary with its vigil of the deep,
Duandon’s soul put out on seas of sleep;
Dreamless he lay ere sunset, and the shell,
Unguarded, from assenting fingers fell.
Came then, nor spilt that anodyne of rest,
His only son, impatient with the quest,
New-fared from crimson victories of war,—
Tall as the spears that lesser champions bore.
To him the horizon was a smitten chord
That rang in challenge to his youthful sword,
And thrilled with all the murmurs of romance
The realms remote from his insatiate lance.
Silent awhile he stood, and ere he spoke,
Routed at last, the sea-mist’s army broke,
And, as its ranks fled landward to their knell,
The consummating sunset smote the shell....
Duandon woke below the evening star,
And saw the foam’s incessant scimetar
Leap from the billow’s sheath, and heard the cry
Of winds unleashed upon the western sky;
Forlorn beyond the darkling waters lay
The sullen embers of the pyre of Day—
Dull, ere obscuring night should make the sea
One with the reaches of infinity;
Then to the sands his gaze returned, to meet
The seaward print of unreturning feet.
Gone was the shell; a sword lay in its stead,
From altars of the buried sun made red—
A blade he knew so well from all the rest
It seemed that instant to transfix his breast.
Afar or near, on waters grey and lone,
No swimmer drave, no arm uplifted shone;
Austere and vacant rolled the cryptic main,
Unsearchable: the prince came not again,
Unseen on tawny beach or waters loud,—
Gone like the shadow of a vanished cloud.
Aye! better vanished, than to wait, as he,
Duandon, silent by the unmastered sea,
From which, till death, his heart was doomed to crave
The uncomprehended tidings of the wave—
An echo of that music from the shell
Forever vibrant in its fall and swell—
Was fated, still, from azure gulfs to dream
He saw the arm of some white swimmer gleam,
Flung for an instant from the shifting spray—
Siren, or son, or both, he could not say.
And feelest thou no pangs of beauty lost,
When morning waves or waters sunset-crost
Cry to thy soul, unsatisfied, alone,
Of Isles to which its younger dreams have flown?
The might-have-been, the nevermore-to-be,
Bears not the deep their antiphon to thee?
For man has found, as man shall ever find,
Some echo of his travail on the wind,
And sigh of great Departures, and the breath
Of pinions incontestable by Death.
Of stars and shadows past to-morrow’s ken
He finds him vision and announcement, when,
As storms beyond the horizon-line prolong
The sea’s imperious, eternal song,
The thunder-chorded surf on yellow sands
Resounds, like harps on which the gods lay hands.
THREE SONNETS OF THE NIGHT SKIES
I
ALDEBARAN AT DUSK
Thou art the star for which all evening waits—
O star of peace, come tenderly and soon!
As for the drowsy and enchanted moon,
She dreams in silver at the eastern gates
Ere yet she brim with light the blue estates
Abandoned by the eagles of the noon.
But shine thou swiftly on the darkling dune
And woodlands where the twilight hesitates.
Above that wide and ruby lake to-West
Wherein the sunset waits reluctantly,
Stir silently the purple wings of Night.
She stands afar, upholding to her breast,
As mighty murmurs reach her from the sea,
Thy lone and everlasting rose of light.
II
THE CHARIOTS OF DAWN
O Night, is this indeed the morning-star,
That now with brandished and impatient beam
On eastern heights of darkness flames supreme,
Or some great captain of the dawn, whose car
Scornful of all thy rear-guard ranks that bar
His battle, now foreruns the helms that gleam
Below horizons of dissevering dream,
Who lifts his javelin to his hosts afar?
Now am I minded of some ocean-king
That in a war of gods has wielded arms,
And still in slumber hears their harness ring
And dreams of isles where golden altars fume,
Till, mad for irretrievable alarms,
He passes down the seas to some strange doom.
III
THE HUNTRESS OF STARS
Tell me, O Night! what horses hale the moon!
Those of the sun rear now on Syria’s day,
But here the steeds of Artemis delay
At heavenly rivers hidden from the noon,
Or quench their starry thirst at cisterns hewn
In midnight’s deepest sapphire, ere she slay
The Bull, and hide the Pleiades’ dismay,
Or drown Orion in a silver swoon.
Are those the stars, and not their furious eyes,
That now before her coming chariot glare?
Is that their nebulous, phantasmal breath
Trailed like a mist upon the winter skies,
Or vapors from a Titan’s pyre of death—
Far-wafted on the orbit of Altair?
THE EVANESCENT
The wind upon the mountain-side
Sang to the dew: “My moments fly:
In yonder valley I must die.
How long thy restless gems abide!”
Low to the bent and laden grass
There came the whisper of the dew:
“My lessening hours, how fleet and few!
What months are thine ere thou shalt pass!”
The grass made murmur to the tree:
“My days a little time are fair;
But oh! thy brooding years to share—
The centuries that foster thee!”
Ere died the wind the tree had said:
“O mountain marvellous and strong,
The aeons of thine age—how long,
When I and all my kin lie dead!”
The mountain spake: “O sea! thy strength
Forevermore I shall not face.
At last I sink to thine embrace;
Thy waves await my ramparts’ length.”
The deep gave moan: “O stars supreme!
Your eyes shall see me mute in death.
Before your gaze I fade like breath
Of vapors in a mortal’s dream.”
Then bore the Void a choral cry,
Descendent from the starry throng:
“A little, and our ancient song
Dies at thy throne, Eternity!”
Then, silence on the heavenly Deep,
Wherein that music sank unheard,
As shuts the midnight on a word
Said by a dreamer in his sleep.
MEMORY
She stands beside the ocean of the Past,
A diver. Pearls and hydras can she bring,
Shells for the child and crystals for the king.
Prone on her reefs the sea-essaying mast
And keels that dared the hurricane are cast—
Trophies of tides invincible that swing
Around the islands where the Sirens sing,
The magic of whose song is hers at last.
Some shadow of the glory she restores,
Tho’ wave and wind devour the Ships of Dream;
For many mark her ere the fall of night,
When the surf’s sound is mighty on her shores,
Singing, as wildly on her bosom gleam
The sea-dews, and the rubies of the light.
THE MOTH OF TIME
Lo! this audacious vision of the dust—
This dream that it hath dreamt! Unresting wings,
Too strong for Time, too frail for timeless things!
Whence all thy thirst for God, thy piteous lust
For life to be when matter’s chain shall rust?
What pact hast thou with the undying kings,
Silence and Death? What sibyl’s counsellings
Assure thee that the eternal laws are just?
Nay! all thy hopes are nothing to the Night,
And justice but a figment of thy dream!
Upon the waste what wide mirages glow,
With hills that shift, and palms that mock the sight,
And cities on the desert’s far extreme—
Those veils we name, and dare to think we know!
THE BLACK VULTURE
Aloof upon the day’s immeasured dome,
He holds unshared the silence of the sky.
Far down his bleak, relentless eyes descry
The eagle’s empire and the falcon’s home—
Far down, the galleons of sunset roam;
His hazards on the sea of morning lie;
Serene, he hears the broken tempest sigh
Where cold sierras gleam like scattered foam.
And least of all he holds the human swarm—
Unwitting now that envious men prepare
To make their dream and its fulfilment one,
When, poised above the caldrons of the storm,
Their hearts, contemptuous of death, shall dare
His roads between the thunder and the sun.
THE HOUSE OF ORCHIDS
Dedicated to Mrs. Joseph B. Coryell
How swift a step from zone to zone!
A moment since, the day
Was cool with winds from linden-bowers flown
And breath of mounded hay
That ripens on the plains,
Beneath the shadow of the western hill;
But here the air is still,
Warm as a Lesbian valley’s afternoon
Made langourous with June
And moist with spirits of unnumbered rains,
Pervaded with a perfume that might be
Of rainbow-haunted lands beyond the sea
And ocean-ending sands—
A ghost of fragrance whose elusive hands
Touch not the hidden harp of memory.
What sprites are those that gleam?
Can eyes betray?
Till now I did not deem
That Beauty’s flaming hands could shape in bloom
So marvelous and delicate designs.
The vision here that shines
Seems not a fabric of our mortal day
And Nature’s tireless loom,
By custom long defiled,
But symbol of a loveliness supreme,
A god’s forgotten dream
In alabaster told by elfin skill
In caverns underneath a haunted hill,
Or in some palace of enchantment hewn
From crystal in the twilights of the moon,
Where white Astarte strays
And Echo and the silver-footed fays
Make alien music, fugitive and wild.
Ye seem as flowers exiled,
More beautiful because they die so soon;
But who the gods that could have scorned
Your tenderness unmarred?
Put first ye forth your fragile wings,
Less of the form than of the soul of things,
Where seraphim had mourned
In Eden’s evening, heavy-starred,
When first the gates were barred
And cruel Time began?
For mystery hath lordship here, and ye
Seem spirit-flowers born to startle man
With intimations of eternity
And hint of what the flowers of Heaven may be.
Nor can your glamour greatly seem of earth:
Her blossoms are of mirth,
But ye with loveliness can tell of grief—
Unhappy love most exquisite and brief.
Wingéd ye seem and fleet,
Such flowers pale as are
Worn by the goddess of a distant star—
Before whose holy eyes
Beauty and evening meet,
Mysterious beauty delicate and strange,
And evening-calm that sighs
With Music’s inexpressible surmise—
Her question ere she dies.
From form to form ye range,
From hue to hue,
And this, with petals wan and mystical,
Seems votive to those spirits of the dew
That weep at silvern twilights silently,
With tears that gently fall
On hidden elves dim-curtained by the rose.
And thou, thy chalice better glows
In purple grottos where the stainless sea
On sands inviolable swirls—
On evanescent pearls,
That hold not all thy bosom’s purity.
And thou, more white
Than when on some blue lake,
Just as the zephyrs wake,
The ripples flash to light—
Touched by a swan’s unsullied breast to foam,
Hadst thou in melancholy halls thy home?
For long ago thou seemest to have slept,
Forlorn, in palace-glooms where queens have wept.
Ah! they too slept at last,
Whose sighs are half the music of the Past!
But thou, O palest one!
Dost seem to scorn the sun,
And, in a tropic, dense,
Languid magnificence,
Desire to know thy former place,
Where no man comes at night,
And in its antic flight
Behold the vampire-bat veer off from thee
As from a phantom face,
Or watch Antares’ light peer craftily
Down from the dank and moonless sky,
As goblins’ eyes might gleam
Or baleful rubies glare,
Muffled in smoke or incense-laden air.
And thou, most weird companion, thou dost seem
Some mottled moth of Hell,
That stealthily might fly
To hover there above the carnal bell
Of some black lily, still and venomous,
And poise forever thus.
Chill, in thy drowsy aether warm,
Softly thou gleamest, subtler form;
Witch-bloom thou seem’st to be,
For Lilith would have bound thee in her hair—
Smiling at dusk inscrutably,
And Circe gathered such for gods to wear,
In evenings when the moon,
A sorceress who steals in white
Along the cloudy parapets of night,
In every glade her ghostly pearl hath strewn.
Thou art as violet-wan
As eyelids of a vestal dead and meek.
If after-life can come to blossoms gone,
Surely Persephone
Shall crown her brow with thee,
In realms where burns nor star nor sun
To show the dead what amaranths to seek.
And ah—this other! none
Of all thy kin more purely is arrayed—
Pallid as Aphrodite’s cheek
To some long passion-swoon betrayed,
By ecstasy foretold;
Yet as with blood thy bosom gleams;
Red as Adonis’ wound it seems,
By Syria mourned of old,
Or scarlet lips that drink from bowls of jade,
Slowly, an ivory poison, sweet and cold....
Oh! mystically strange
That speechless things should so have power to hint,
With subtle form and tint
That seize the heart’s high memories unaware,
The sorrow and the mystery of Change,
And elements in Fate’s controlling plan
Not altogether ministrant to man
Nor mindful of his care—
Some joy to death akin,
Or tragic kiss, or fruit malignly fair,
Some garden built by Sin
For Love to wander in,
Some face whose beauty bids the heart despair!
And yet, O blossoms pure!
How marvelous the lure
Of your fragility and innocence—
This grace and wistfulness of helpless things
That ask no recompense!
Ye give the spirit wings,
For yours the beauty that is near to pain,
And stir the heart again
With visions of the Flowers that abide—
Ah! sweet
As when love’s glances meet
Across the music, heard at eventide!