BLIND THAMYRIS
By T. STURGE MOORE
SINCE my father was a hero and my mother a goddess of the woods, I was sent when twelve years old to the cave of Chiron, that he might instruct me in wisdom and valour. This life, divorced from all female tenderness, appealed to my pride, and only at night were my eyes ever moistened with regret. I was now free to follow a stream until, too weary to advance further, some cradle of scented herbs would lure me to rest and doze. At length twilight brought me an energy, winged with dread of the dusking forests, that carried me right home to the cavern. The sources were always my goal, the more easy descent seawards never tempted my morning moods: and, as he taught me the lyre or the control of my voice, Chiron remarked that a similar bent was evinced by an instinctive preference for those words and cadences that lead the spirit away from the high-roads of thought and feeling. Surely emotions well up in the fastnesses of tranquillity, close under the blue and white of heaven, more virginal than can be experienced in lowland retreats? As time wore on, Chiron, the daily lesson being ended, began to speak to me of a rhapsodist, former pupil and great favourite of his. "Agenor," he began, "like thyself, Thamyris was ever striving to reach the summits before joint and sinew were sufficiently tough. Alas, though he has often brought back with him the rarest strophes and melodies, men have refused to listen to them! They prefer a music that better harmonises with their garish sea-board towns, and he wanders shrouded in an ever deeper gloom." With a sigh he paused, and I waited, expecting to be warned not thus to estrange myself from humanity by persistently climbing among the hills. But he seemed unable so to conclude, and presently bid me run away and practise throwing the spear.
One forenoon when wind, so strong as to seem foreign to the settled brilliance of the weather, was bowing the fir-trees, and now here, now there, their backs arched silverly, flashing like waves on the dark green ridges, while the sound was that of a chorus of Titans rejoicing in violence (so much so that we had to retreat well back within the cave before we could hear ourselves play or sing), Chiron broke off the lesson, still disturbed it may be by the hurly-burly without, though it strained but faintly through the stillness held under that roof of rock. He sat gazing forth into the sunny turbulence, so grandly though jaggedly framed; and I, leaning back against his flank, watched his moved visage worn with much living. Then for the first time he began to recite me actual words of Thamyris, recalling how their public delivery had proved that those who thronged round the other rhapsodists would never collect about him.
Untouched white cloud,
Like a task acclaimed
When the heart is young,
Thou fliest higher
Than the eagle deed
That is praised by men
Unheeded silence,
In the night or at noon,
Thou singest to the hilltops
A song that is richer
Than the tales of war
Which men crowd to hear.
Magnificent joys
Lie about like garments
Amazingly broidered;
A god has discarded them
Before launching upward
In naked loneliness.
But no human hand
Lifts a single tunic;
No man's heart prefigures
The deep satisfaction
Of moving vested
In the pictured raiment
That a god walked the earth in.
Chiron was silent, and I dreamed of finding and putting on the slough of Apollo. I saw myself in a sultry glare climbing boulders with grey lichen-crusted cheeks, and dark moss-bearded cavities down which I peered in hopes of finding a cupful of collected dew. At last I arrived on the crest, and there, at the bottom of a crater of wild tumbled blocks, lay gleaming somewhat silver and violet and blue. I scrambled down; a pattern of scaled serpents was looped inextricably over white samite. I lifted it, and from the inside there slipped with a swish a body-vest of pale vermilion rippled with gold in a device of arrows, each drawn to the head in a sturdy bow: an armoury of the proper size for an host of mice had it been real instead of pictured. I gasped; and Chiron's eyes met mine, so that I blushed all down my neck.