Poems of West & East

by V. Sackville-West

Then with a twirl
Thinking I slept,
And a joyous whirl,
Into a dance leapt
The careless spirit too long restrained;
The purest dancing,
Feet sometimes chancing
To touch the ground;
Then starting up with a fresh high bound,
To hang for a moment poised in the air,
And a glimpse of white teeth glancing
And a laughing face beneath tossing hair;
An orgy, a revel, a living joy,
Embodied in one slim woodland boy,
Dancing forward, backward, now here, now there,
Swaying to every impulse unconstrained.

Thou wert too pure for Bacchus, and too young for
Pan.
What wert thou? In the daytime dost thou sleep
In a cave
Like a grave,
Till the moon calls thee, in the sleep of man,
To thy light revels through the sombre deep
Wood's shadows to a space among the trees,
Where the breeze
Makes music through the branches for thy dance,
And the large-eyed and silent deer stand round
Peeping through tree-trunks, and each forest sound
—The trickling stream's
Murmur in its dreams,
The shepherd's pipe, far-echoing by chance,—
Melt all for thee
To one soft harmony,
While for the lighting of thy mossy slope
The moon thy lover sheds an opal glow,
Pale silver-green, the colour of the leaves
Of olive-trees,
The limelight on the stage for Youth and Joy and
Hope?
And at the first rose menace of the dawn
Must thou go,
Fly to thy cave, thou little pagan Faun?

The fount of joy was bubbling in thine eyes,
Dancing was in thy feet,
And on thy lips a laugh that never dies,
Unutterably sweet.
Dance on! for ever young, for ever fair,
Lightfooted as a frightened bounding deer,
Thy wreath of vine-leaves twisted in thy hair,
Through all the changing seasons of the year,
And tread, to Autumn's gorgeous hymn of praise,
And to the happy Spring's light lilt of pleasure,
And to the dirgeful chant of Winter's days,
And ever varying, ever suited measure;
And in the Summer, when the reeking earth
Swings a vast censer, as it is most meet,
Praise thou for lavish gifts, new hopes, new birth,
Praise with the dancing of thy tireless feet!

I woke to daylight, and to find
A wreath of fading vine-leaves, rough entwined,
Lying, as dropped in hasty flight, upon my floor.

* Reprinted by kind permission of the Editor of the "English Review," where it first appeared in August 1913

CONSTANTINOPLE

DHJI-HAN-GHIR. For H.N.

FOR years it had been neglected,
This wilderness garden of ours,
And its ruin had shone reflected
In its pools through abandoned hours.
For none had cared for its beauty
Till we came, the strangers, the Giaours,
And none had thought of a duty
Towards its squandering flowers.

Of broken wells and fountains
There were half a dozen or more,
And, beyond the sea, the mountains
Of that far Bithynian shore
Were blue in the purple distance
And white was the cap they wore,
And never in our existence
Had life seemed brighter before!

And the fruit-trees grew in profusion,
Quince and pomegranate and wine,
And the roses in rich confusion
With the lilac intertwine,
And the Banksia rose, the creeper,
Which is golden like yellow wine,
Is surely more gorgeous and deeper
In this garden of mine and thine.