Poems - Second Series

by Sir John Collings Squire

Alone and sad, alone and kind and sweet,
But always peaceful and removed and proud,
Whether with loveliness revealed complete,
Or veiling from our vision in a cloud:
Our souls' eternal listener, could we wonder
That men who made of sun and storm and thunder
The awful forms of strong divinity,
Heard in each storm the noise of travelling feet,
Should, gazing at thy face with hearts made free,
Have felt a pure, immortal Power in thee?

Selene, Cynthia, and Artemis,
The swift proud goddess with the silver bow,
Diana, she whose downward-bending kiss
One only knew, though all men yearned to know;
The shepherd on a hill his flock was keeping,
The night's pale huntress came and found him sleeping:
She stooped: he woke, and saw her hair that shone,
And lay, drawn up to cool and timeless bliss
Lapt in her radiant arms, Endymion,
All the still night, until the night was gone.

By many names they knew thee, but thy shape
Was woman's always, transient and white:
A flashing huntress leaving hinds agape,
A sweet descent of beauty in the night:
Yet some, more fierce and more distraught their dreaming,
Brooded, until they fashioned from thy seeming,
A lithe and luring queen with fatal breath,
A witch the man who saw might not escape,
A snare that gleamed in shadowy groves of death,
The tall tiaraed Syrian Ashtoreth.

And even to-night in African forests some
There are, possessed by such a blasphemy;
Through branching beams thy fevered votaries come
To appease their brains' distorted mask of thee.
There in the glades the drums pulsate and languish,
Men leap and wail to dim the victim's anguish
In the sad frenzy of the sacrifice.
They are slaves to thee, made mad because thou art dumb,
And dumb thou lookest on them from the skies,
Above their fires and dances, blood and cries.

So these; but otherwhere, at such an hour,
In all the continents, by all the seas,
Men, naming not the goddess, feel thy power,
Adoring her with gentler rites than these:
The thoughts of myriad hearts to thee uplifted
Rise like a smoke above thine altars drifted,
Perpetual incense poured before thy throne
By those whom thou hast given thy secret dower,
Those in whose kindred eyes thy light is known,
Whom thou hast signed and sealed for thine own.

For thee they watch by Asian peaks remote,
Where thy snows gleam above the pointing pines;
Entranced on templed lakes is many a boat
For thee, where clear thy dropt reflection shines;
On the great seas where nothing else is tender,
Rising and setting, unto thee surrender
All lonely hearts in lonely wandering ships;
And, where their warm far-scattered islands float,
Through forests many a flower-crowned maiden slips
To gaze on thee, with parted burning lips.

O thus they do, and thus they did of old;
Our hearts were never secret in thy sight;
Ere our first records were thy shrine was cold
That speechless eyes went seeking in the night;
Beyond the compass of our dim traditions
Thou knewest of men the pitiful ambitions,
Their loves and their despair; within thy ken
All our poor history has been unrolled;
Thou hast seen all races born and die again,
The climbing and the crumbling towers of men.

Black were the hollows of that Emperor's eyes
Who paced with backward arms beyond his tents,
Lone in the night, and felt above him rise
The ancient conqueror's sloping, smooth, immense,
Moon-pointing Pyramid's enduring courses,
Heard not his sentries, nor his stamping horses,
But thought of Egypt dead upon that air,
Fighting with his moon-coloured memories
Of vanished kings who builded, and the bare
Sands in the moon before those builders were.

Restless, he knew that moon who watched him muse,
Had seen a restless Cæsar brood on fame
Amid the Pharaohs' broken avenues.
And, circling round that fixed monition, came
Woven by moonlight, random, transitory,
Fragments of all the dim receding story:
The moonlit water dripping from the oars
Of triremes in the bay of Syracuse;
The opposing bivouacs upon the shores,
That knew dead Hector's and Achilles' wars.

He saw fall'n Carthage, Alexander's grave,
The tomb of Moses in the wilderness,
The moonlight on the Atlantean wave
That covered all a multitude's distress:
Cities and hosts and emperors departed
Under the steady moon. And sullen-hearted
He turned away, and, in a little, died,
Even as he who hunted from his cave
And struck his foe, and stripped the shaggy hide
Under the moon, and was not satisfied.