PART II
CORNUCOPIA
Now music fills the night with moving shades;
Its velvet darkness, veined like a grape,
Obscures and falls round many a subtle shape
—Figures that steal through cool tall colonnades,
Vast minotaurian corridors of sleep;
Rhythmic they pass us, splashed by red cascades
Of wine, fierce-flashing fountains whose proud waves
Shimmer awhile; plunge foaming over steep
Age-polished rocks, into the dim cold caves
Of starlit dusk below—then merge with night,
Softly as children sinking into sleep.
But now more figures sway into our sight;
Strong and bare-shouldered, pressed and laden down,
Stagger across the terraces. They bear
Great Cornucopia of summer fruit
And heavy roses scented with the noon
—Piled up with fruit and blossoms, all full blown,
Crimson, or golden as the harvest moon—
Piled up and overflowing in a flood
Of riches; brilliant-plumaged birds, that sing
As the faint playing on a far sweet lute,
Warble their tales of conquest and of love;
Perch on each shoulder; sweep each rainbow wing
Like light'ning through the breathless dark above.
Heaped up in vases gems shine hard and bright;
Sudden they flare out—gleaming red like blood—
For now the darkness turns to swelling light,
Great torches gild each shadow, tear the sky,
As drums tear through the silence of the night;
Breaking its crystal quiet—making us cry
Or catch our sobbing breath in sudden fear.
A shadow stumbles, and the jewels shower
On to the pavers with a sharp sweet sound.
They mingle with the fountain drops that flower
Up in a scarlet bloom above the ground,
A beauteous changing blossom; then they rain
On to the broad mysterious terraces,
Where sea-gods rise to watch in cold disdain
Before those vast vermillion palaces,
—Watch where the slumbering coral gods of noon,
Drunk with the sudden golden light and flare
Of flaming torches, try to pluck and tear
That wan enchanted lotus flower, the moon,
Down from its calm still waters; thus they fall,
Like flowing plumes, the fountains of our festival.
Slowly the torches die. They echo long,
These last notes of a Bacchanalian song,
Of drifting drowsy beauty, born of sleep,
—Vast as the sea, as changing and as deep.
In thanksgiving for shelt'ring summer skies
Still, far away, a fervent red light glows.
Small winds brush past against our lips and eyes,
Caress them like a laughing summer rose,
And rainbow moths flit by, in circling flight.
A harp sobs out its crystal syruppings;
Faintly it sounds, as the poor petal-wings,
Fragile yet radiant, of a butterfly
Beating against the barriers of night.
Then from the Ocean came the Syren song,
Heavy with perfume, yet faint as a sigh,
Kissing our minds, and changing right from wrong;
Chaining our limbs; making our bodies seem
Inert and spellbound, dead as in a dream.
* * * * *
Bound by the silver fetters of your voice
To this new slavery of dreams,
We, listening, rejoice.
The magic strains
Swell in this darkness star-devoid.
The music streams
Upon the world in patterns passionate yet clear,
And stains
Each soul. The mind, decoyed
By thoughts that grind and tear
Away old values,
Is sent down other thoughts
So subtly swift,
That in their fleeting passage
They can cut adrift our souls
Upon a sea of wonder and of fear.
Within the arid minds of men
This music sounds but once, for then
They hear no other song.
In it, tumultuous rush of wings,
The glamour of old lovely things
In deserts buried long,
The grace of beasts that bound and leap
With movements blithe and strong
—Of those that creep
Away in hissing-reptile rage—
All these, all these are found.
They hear
The secrets, solved, of each dead age,
Each mystery is clear.
For in this music's flow, the din
Of spheres that tear and speed and spin
Through pulsing space is heard,
And all things men have loved and feared
Are mirror'd in each sound.
SONG
Our hidden voices, wreathed with love's soft flowers,
Wind-toss'd thro' valleys, tremble across seas
To turbann'd cities; touch tall lonely towers,
Call to you thro' the sky, the wind, the trees.