Ah yet, incline, dear Sisters, or my song
That with the light wings of the skimming swallow
Must range the reedy slopes, will work him wrong!
And with some golden shaft do thou, Apollo,
Show the pine-shadowed path that none may follow; For, as the blue air shuts behind a bird,
Round him closed Ida's cloudy woods and rills!
Day-long, night-long, by echoing height and hollow,
We called him, but our tumult died unheard:
Down from the scornful sky
Our faint wing-broken cry
Fluttered and perished among the many-folded hills.
IV
Ay, though we clomb each faint-flushed peak of vision,
Nought but our own sad faces we divined:
Thy radiant way still laughed us to derision,
And still revengeful Echo proved unkind;
And oft our faithless hearts half feared to find
Thy cold corse in some dark mist-drenched ravine
Where the white foam flashed headlong to the sea:
How should we find thee, spirits deaf and blind
Even to the things which we had heard and seen?
Eyes that could see no more
The old light on sea and shore,
What should they hope or fear to find? They found not thee;
V
For thou wast ever alien to our skies,
A wistful stray of radiance on this earth,
A changeling with deep memories in thine eyes
Mistily gazing thro' our loud-voiced mirth
To some fair land beyond the gates of birth;
Yet as a star thro' clouds, thou still didst shed
Through our dark world thy lovelier, rarer glow;
Time, like a picture of but little worth,
Before thy young hand lifelessly outspread,
At one light stroke from thee
Gleamed with Eternity;
Thou gav'st the master's touch, and we—we did not know.
VI
Not though we gazed from heaven o'er Ilion
Dreaming on earth below, mistily crowned
With towering memories, and beyond her shone
The wine-dark seas Achilles heard resound!
Only, and after many days, we found
Dabbled with dew, at border of a wood
Bedded in hyacinths, open and a-glow
Thy Homer's Iliad.... Dryad tears had drowned
The rough Greek type and, as with honey or blood,
One crocus with crushed gold
Stained the great page that told
Of gods that sighed their loves on Ida, long ago.
VII
See—for a couch to their ambrosial limbs
Even as their golden load of splendour presses
The fragrant thyme, a billowing cloud up-swims
Of springing flowers beneath their deep caresses,
Hyacinth, lotus, crocus, wildernesses
Of bloom ... but clouds of sunlight and of dew
Dropping rich balm, round the dark pine-woods curled
That the warm wonder of their in-woven tresses,
And all the secret blisses that they knew,
Where beauty kisses truth
In heaven's deep heart of youth,
Might still be hidden, as thou art, from the heartless world.
VIII