Your music mocks the bitter lay!
Idle as any song of mine
The melody from copse or pine—
Born at the dying of the day;
But oh! the full accomplishment!
Reproach unplanned but exquisite!
Hark how the unpurchased throats transmit
The tidings of a world content!
To you the tale is all of joy,
But we from rapture ask its pang;
And tho’ an angel came and sang,
Our hearts would worship—and destroy.
And tho for ecstasy you sing,
Our dim dissent awaits your tale,
And in the song there seems to wail
Another message than you bring:
Unmastered still by disbelief,
You tell our doubts in twilight strain;
Untouched by man’s perennial pain,
You give some echo of his grief;
Or so we dream. The very wind
Serves at the soul’s aeolian chords;
Rulers dismayed, uncertain lords,
In all we find, ourselves we find.
But you escape the nets of care.
Whither at last my feet shall go
I know not: from your song I know
You find the truth, and find it fair.
JUSTICE
Nila the youth, first-born, whose father’s name
Was honored in his market-place of Ind,
Loved Unda, and the dreaming twain, betrothed,
Waited the springtide and their marriage-rites.
The springtide came, but Nila’s joy came not,
For she, the girl that was to be his bride,
Was ravished from her lover, kin and home—
Prey to the bull-necked Rajah on the hill.
Then Nila, heedless of his father’s hope,
Vanished. Anon before the palace gate
That looked across the palm-tops to the south,
And whence the road ran eastward to the town,
There sat one cowled, a grey and mournful shape,
Who spoke not, and was deemed, for silence, saint,—
Who lived upon the offerings of the poor,
And gave no sign, nor vision of his face,
To slave nor councillor. “For,” said the youth,
“It well may be that on some day she fare
Forth to the temple, or to other ends:
And I, shall I not know her as she goes,
Tho’ jewelled curtains hide the loyal face?
Aye! but to be as near to her as now
And do her service once in all my days
Were better than despair. Yet if men find
That I am Nila, they may well discern
Wherefore I wait, and so the Rajah know,
Or, at the least, my kindred draw me hence.”
He waiting, season after season came
With weal and woe unto the sons of men—
The time of sowing and the time to reap,
Summer, and crashing of the winter rain,
And plague and famine, gods that slew unseen.
He heard the stars plot evil unto man,
And saw the baleful meteor float to light
And many suns look down upon man’s pain.
The days had each their will of him. The years
Wrought as with cunning chisels. Gaunt he grew,
A silent watcher by the carven gate,
And saw his kind go in and forth again,
But never one whose coming, with a thrill,
Sang to his heart: “Lo! I am even she!”
Hooded, unknown, so sat he ’mid the crows—
Sear as the summer, grey as any rain—
And watched the flowers’ birth and death, and heard
The sparrows’ song of mating, or the din
Where the shrill apes held council in the grove.
Often, in dreams that broke his daytime’s dream,
He somehow, somewhere, found the long-betrothed,
Far-wandered too in sleep’s Elysium,
And clasped her form, and kissed her deathless lips,
Hushed, in some garden of eternal dews;
Then woke to silence and the dark, save where
In one lean tower gleamed a shrouded lamp,
Like some red planet still among the stars,
Or, hung above the temple to the south,
The failing lanthorn of the moon ... Far off
A jackal barked ... A whisper touched the wind.