WHAT OF THE NIGHT?
What of the night
And the eventual silences?
Art thou not cold with the knowledge of decay
And the uncompromising reaches of the earth?
What of the night
When the tune falters and the blood chills?
When thou art one with the grass
And the underbrush of the world,
Wilt thou forget the names of flowers,
The rhythm of song and the lips, still balmy with the breasts of women?
When thou and the fog on the hilltop are as brother and sister,
Wilt thou forget utterly the ways of men,
The clash of swords and the sting of wine,
The dim horizons and the grace of girls?
When thou art alone eternally
What of the night?
Where will God be
When thou art swathed in silence;
When the wreckage of dreams has crushed thee
And the lust for springtimes dissolved thee?
Wilt thou have visions only of the dawn
And autumn sunsets?
Will the memory of women’s faces haunt thy grave?
Will the odor of blue flowers find thy dust?
When thou art choking on the calm indifference of youth
And the everlasting beauty of trees,
Wilt thou dream only of the June,
The love of women and the great democracy of men?
When thou hast fought and failed,
And thy brow has withered laurelless,
And thy name has been effaced by the insatiable winds,
And thou hast gone out at the Western gate
To join the laggards of the dead,
Wilt thou crave only the withheld success,
The transitory fame of twilight years?
Will thy soul cry out only for the song,
The red dawn and the glad triumph of love?
Wilt thou indeed forget the days of pain,
The ineffectual prayers,
The lies of time and the bitterness of defeat?
Or, remembering these things,
Wilt thou forget the hands of women and the rude love of men,
And be glad of thy dark quietude?
When thou art part of the impending gloom,
I deem that life will seem to thee
In no such wise,—
But rather thou wilt dream it as a whole;
Not as a song, nor yet a broken bell;
But all that thou hast been—the great tears,
The rain, the kisses and the flutes,
The old sorrows and the hills at dawn,
Much laughter and much grief and the stern fight.
And thou shalt know how all of life is gain—
The gold of youth, the gray defeat of age—
How in the soul’s inharmony there lies
The incoherent unity of things.
The Forum Willard Huntington Wright
A THRENODY
In Memory of the Destruction of Messina By Earthquake
Sicilian Muse! O thou who sittest dumb
Amid the sodden fields and ways forlorn,
Where once the herdsmen singing, watched their kine
Breast-deep in fragrance, odorous eve and morn;
Stranger to thee, yet led by love I come,
A suppliant sable-stoled, to mix with thine
My tears, and at thy shrine
Kindle a funeral torch for Sicily:
Give not the suppliant’s prayer the meed of blame!
Scorn not the stranger’s proffered oil and wine!
O thou from whom the heavenly madness came,
When Orpheus hymning struck his golden lute,
And stirred old memories in Persephone,
While all the lonely shades in hell stood mute
To watch the still-beloved Eurydice
Borne lightly upward on the silver surge
To Enna’s flowery verge;—
Spirit august! Child of Mnemosyne!
With reverence and true humility
I break before thy feet my careless flute,
And wait upon my lips thy touch of flame:
Begin, Sicilian Muse! Begin the dirge!
O race unmindful of the Destinies!
The dread Euminides
Or Mœræ old, sent from Earth’s inmost core
A tremor, warning blindly ye who, blind,
See not the sleepless doom that evermore
Has watched your tragic shore
Since lost sea-rovers shaded first their eyes
To spy the riches of your waving store,
And grated up your sands with doubtful keel.
The startled jungle growled above its young;
The Arctic foxes snuffed the scentless wind;
But ye who knew yourselves a fated race,
That gods have loved and gods to hate exposed,
Though black the death clouds over Ætna hung,
Forgot the anguish in Pompeii’s face,
Beneath her half-drawn winding sheet disclosed;
Forgot white Lisbon’s doom, nor called to mind—
In pleasant Zancle taking noonday ease—
How, from its ashes by the western seas
A stricken Phœnix rises, stone and steel.
Fresh as her Poro flowers at early dawn,
When over Hybla’s hills the yellow bees
From aromatic blossoms shake the dew;
Fair as the maiden ere by dark Fate drawn,
She saw the wide earth yawn
Before the thunderous horses, and the strong
Arm of Aïdes crushed her gathered flowers;
So fresh, so fair, amid her storied seas,
She who remains through changes æon-long
A greater Helen wooed with sword and song,
Of mightier victors bride and battle prize,
Lay lapped in peace, when swift from Hades driven,
Upward the death-king came; the earth was riven,
And through the darkness rang her children’s cries.
Now Scylla unto fierce Charybdis calls,
While on the water spreads a crimson stain;
Now Galatea sobs in Ocean’s halls,
And vengeful Polyphemus laughs again.
The Nereids now in oozy caverns hide,
Where sea-kings of the old Æolian shore
Watch sunken argosies forevermore,
And tell their tales of dread Poseidon’s hate;
While dimly from the far, ensanguined tide
Patient Odysseus furrowed once of yore,
A glint of daylight through the darkness falls
On swaying helmets, tumbled bronze and gold,
On broidered vestments stiff and Tyrian dyed.
There hide they; but the sea-kings keep their state,
Telling of ancient dooms and deaths of old,
Nor know they how beside the darkened strait
And up the slopes of olive, vine and grain,
The dryads wail a land left desolate.
Wail thou, great Muse, the dear Sicilian land!
Now greater grief is thine than when of old
Young Adon in the Cyprian’s arms lay cold,
And Daphnis’ years were told.
Take thou the lyre from Time’s enfeebled hand;
Hushed is the music of Empedocles,
Of splendid Pindar, pure Simonides,
Bion and Moschus and Theocritus,
And those who unto us
Nameless, yet live as human memories.
Hushed is the last of all that laurelled band,
Hushed, or on Charon’s strand
Urging in vain petition dolorous,
To pass where Pan, his boyish pipings done,
Stands wistful, while the nymphs, by fear made bold,
Cling with their long lithe arms about his knees.
Wail thou, great Muse! or loose from Acheron
Some worthy bearer of the singing bough
Whose madness whirls me now
On melting wings too near the southern sun.
Yet why for aught on earth should grief be loud,
Since all that is, is born to pass away?
Hero and maiden to the urn are vowed,
And beauty saves not when the debt falls due;
Apollo with the darker gods has died,
And Gæa at the last shall be as they.
O Helen of the soul! O golden isle!
By beauty doomed, by beauty sanctified,
Thou too canst not abide,
But like all else shalt last a little while—
A little longer than the falling spray—
Then pass as planet dust or gaseous cloud,
To build new cosmos, gnawed by new decay.
Earth’s senseless atoms ever clasp and whirl,
Unclasp again to form in mazes new;
And ever on the white cliff stands some girl
With dead eyes gazing on the sailless blue.
Earth’s roses die, but still the rose lives on,
The song survives the swift Leucadian leap;—
A dream of immortality is ours.
Where golden Daphnis in the morning shone,
Fresh sprung from Helicon,
New shepherds singing lead their careless sheep
Above the graves of Athens, Carthage, Rome,
Vandals and Moslems, and strange Northern Powers
That filled their destined hours,
And fed in turn the rich Sicilian loam,
Building, like coral insects from the deep,
Enchanted islands that till earth is gone,
Swept back to chaos in the atom swirl,
Shall be the seeker’s light, the spirit’s home.
Though Ætna crumble and the dark seas rise
Sowing the uplands with their sterile brine,
Still shall the soul descry with wistful eyes
Sicilian headlands bright with flower and fruit;
Still shall she hear, though all earth’s lips be mute,
Sicilian music in the morning skies.
Yea, deep within the heart of man it lies,
This visioned island bright with old romance,
A race inheritance
Of rest and joy and faith in things divine,
That shall endure awhile through change and chance,
And have the meaning of a childhood shrine,
Remembered when the faith of childhood dies.
Now fails the song, and down the lonely ways
The last low echoes die upon the breeze.
I lay my lyre upon the moveless knees
Of her who by the hollow roadway stays,
In anguish waiting for her children slain
That shall not come again
With springtime, leading the new lambs to graze.
They come no more; but while o’er hill and plain
The twilight darkens, and the evening rose
Aloft on Ætna glows,
Silent she sits amid the sodden leas,
With eyes that level on the ocean haze
Their unobserving stare, as seaward gaze
The eyes of stolid caryatides.
Scribner’s Louis V. Ledoux