Transcriber’s Note:

New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.

THE RICCARDI

PRESS BOOKS

¶ Of this edition of TWELVE POEMS BY EDITH WHARTON 130 copies have been printed in the Riccardi fount on handmade paper of which 100 are for sale.

¶ Copy Number 44

TWELVE POEMS BY
EDITH WHARTON

TWELVE POEMS BY EDITH

WHARTON PUBLISHED BY THE

MEDICI SOCIETY VII GRAFTON

STREET LONDON

MDCCCCXXVI

CONTENTS

NIGHTINGALES IN PROVENCE

(i)

Whence come they, small and brown,

Miraculous and frail,

Like spring’s invisible pollen blown

On the wild southern gale?

From whatsoever depth of gold and blue,

Far-templed sand and ringèd palms they wing,

Falling like dew

Upon the land, they bring

Music and spring,

With all things homely-sweet

Exhaled beneath the feet

On stony mountain-trail,

Or where green slopes, through tamarisk and pine,

Seaward decline—

Thyme and the lavender,

Where honey-bees make stir,

And the green dragon-flies with silver whirr

Loot the last rosemaries—

The morning-glory, rosy as her name,

The poppies’ leaping flame

Along the kindled vines,

Down barren banks the vetches spilt like lees,

In watery meadows the great celandines

Afloat like elfin moons,

In the pale world of dunes

A foam of asphodel

Upon the sea’s blue swell,

And, where the great rocks valley-ward are rolled,

The tasselled ilex-bloom fringing dark woods with gold.

Shyly the first begin—

And the thrilled ear delays,

Through a fresh veil of interblossomed mays

Straining to win

That soft sequestered note,

Where the new throat,

In some deep cleft of quietness remote,

Its budding bliss essays.

Shyly the first begin—

But, as the numerous rose

First to the hedgerow throws

A blossom here and there,

As if in hope to win

The unheeding glances of the passer-by,

And, never catching his dulled eye,

Thinks: “But my tryst is with the Spring!”

And suddenly the dusty roadside glows

With scented glory, crimsoned to its close—

So wing by wing,

Unheeded and unheard,

Bird after bird,

They come;

And where the woods were dumb,

Dumb all the streamsides and unlistening vales,

Now glory streams along the evening gales,

And all the midday is a murmuring,

Now they are come.

(ii)

I lie among the thyme:

The sea is at my feet,

And all the air is sweet

With the capricious chime

Of interwoven notes

From those invisible and varying throats,

As though the blossomed trees,

The laden breeze,

The springs within their caves,

And even the sleeping waves,

Had all begun to sing.

Sweet, sweet, oh heavy-sweet

As tropic bales undone

At a Queen’s ebon feet

In equatorial sun,

Those myriad balmy voices

Drip iterated song,

And every tiny tawny throat rejoices

To mix its separate rapture with the throng.

For now the world is theirs,

And the captivated airs

Carry no other note.

As from midsummer’s throat,

Strong-pillared, organ-built,

Pours their torrential glory.

On their own waves they float,

And toss from crest to crest their cockle-shell of story—

And, as plumed breakers tilt

Against the plangent beaches,

And all the long reticulated reaches

Hiss with their silver lances,

And heave with their deep rustle of retreat

At fall of day—

So swells, and so withdraws that tidal lay

As spring advances....

(iij)

I lie among the thyme,

The sea is at my feet,

And the slow-kindling moon begins to climb

To her bejewelled seat—

And now, and now again,

Mixed with her silver rain,

Listen, a rarer strain,

A tenderer fall—

And all the night is white and musical,

The forests hold their breath, the sky lies still

On every listening hill,

And far far out those straining sails,

Even as they dip and turn,

One moment backward yearn

To the rich laughter of the nightingales.

MISTRAL IN THE MAQUIS

Roofed in with creaking pines we lie

And see the waters burn and whiten,

The wild seas race the racing sky,

The tossing landscape gloom and lighten.

With emerald streak and silver blotch

The white wind paints the purple sea.

Warm in our hollow dune we watch

The honey-orchis nurse the bee.

Gold to the keel the startled boats

Beat in on palpitating sail,

While overhead with many throats

The choral forest hymns the gale.

’Neath forest-boughs the templed air

Hangs hushed as when the Host is lifted,

While, flanks astrain and rigging bare,

The last boat to the port has drifted....

Nought left but the lost wind that grieves

On darkening seas and furling sails,

And the long light that Beauty leaves

Upon her fallen veils....

LES SALETTES
[December 1923]

Let all my waning senses reach

To clasp again that secret beach,

Pine-roofed and rock-embrasured, turned

To where the winter sunset burned

Beyond a purpling dolphin-cape

On charmèd seas asleep....

Let every murmur, every shape,

Fanned by that breathing hour’s delight,

Against the widening western deep

Hold back the hour, hold back the night....

For here, across the molten sea,

From golden islands lapped in gold,

Come all the shapes that used to be

Part of the sunset once to me,

And every breaker’s emerald arch

Bears closer their ethereal march,

And flings its rose and lilac spray

To dress their brows with scattered day.

As trooping shoreward, one by one,

Swift in the pathway of the sun,

With lifted arms and eyes that greet,

The lost years hasten to my feet.

All is not pain, their eyes declare;

The shoreward ripples are their voice,

The sunset, streaming through their hair,

Coils round me in a fiery flood,

And all the sounds of that rich air

Are in the beating of my blood,

Crying: Rejoice, rejoice, rejoice!

Rejoice, because such skies are blue,

Each dawn, above a world so fair,

Because such glories still renew

To transient eyes the morning’s hue.

Such buds on every fruit-tree smile,

Such perfumes blow on every gale,

Such constellated hangings veil

The outer emptiness awhile;

And these frail senses that were thine,

Because so frail, and worn so fine,

Are as a Venice glass, wherethrough

Life’s last drop of evening wine

Shall like a draught of morning shine.

The glories go; their footsteps fade

Into an all-including shade,

And isles and sea and clouds and coasts

Wane to an underworld of ghosts.

But as I grope with doubtful foot

By myrtle branch and lentisk root

Up the precipitous pine-dark way,

Through fringes of the perished day

Falters a star, the first alight,

And threaded on that tenuous ray

The age-long promise reappears,

And life is Beauty, fringed with tears.

DIEU D’AMOUR
[A CASTLE IN CYPRUS]

Beauty hath two great wings

That lift me to her height,

Though steep her secret dwelling clings

’Twixt earth and light.

Thither my startled soul she brings

In a murmur and stir of plumes,

And blue air cloven,

And in aerial rooms

Windowed on starry springs

Shows me the singing looms

Whereon her worlds are woven;

Then, in her awful breast,

Those heights descending,

Bears me, a child at rest,

At the day’s ending,

Till earth, familiar as a nest,

Again receives me,

And Beauty veiled in night,

Benignly bending,

Drops from the sinking west

One feather of our flight,

And on faint sandals leaves me.

SEGESTA

High in the secret places of the hills

Cliff-girt it stands, in grassy solitude,

No ruin but a vision unachieved.

This temple is a house not made with hands

But born of man’s incorrigible need

For permanence and beauty in the scud

And wreckage of mortality—as though

Great thoughts, communing in the noise of towns

With inward isolation and deep peace,

And dreams gold-paven for celestial feet,

Had wrought the sudden wonder; and behold,

The sky, the hills, the awful colonnade,

And, night-long woven through the fane’s august

Intercolumniations, all the stars

Processionally wheeling—

Then it was

That, having reared their wonder, it would seem

The makers feared their God might prove less great

Than man’s heart dreaming on him—and so left

The shafts unroofed, untenanted the shrine.

THE TRYST
[1914]

I said to the woman: Whence do you come,

With your bundle in your hand?

She said: In the North I made my home,

Where slow streams fatten the fruitful loam,

And the endless wheat-fields run like foam

To the edge of the endless sand.

I said: What look have your houses there,

And the rivers that glass your sky?

Do the steeples that call your people to prayer

Lift fretted fronts to the silver air,

And the stones of your streets, are they washed and fair

When the Sunday folk go by?

My house is ill to find, she said,

For it has no roof but the sky;

The tongue is torn from the steeple-head,

The streets are foul with the slime of the dead,

And all the rivers run poison-red

With the bodies drifting by.

I said: Is there none to come at your call

In all this throng astray?

They shot my husband against a wall,

And my child (she said), too little to crawl,

Held up its hands to catch the ball

When the gun-muzzle turned its way.

I said: There are countries far from here

Where the friendly church-bells call,

And fields where the rivers run cool and clear,

And streets where the weary may walk without fear,

And a quiet bed, with a green tree near,

To sleep at the end of it all.

She answered: Your land is too remote,

And what if I chanced to roam

When the bells fly back to the steeples’ throat,

And the sky with banners is all afloat,

And the streets of my city rock like a boat

With the tramp of her men come home?

I shall crouch by the door till the bolt is down,

And then go in to my dead.

Where my husband fell I will put a stone,

And mother a child instead of my own,

And stand and laugh on my bare hearth-stone

When the King rides by, she said.

BATTLE SLEEP
[1915]

Somewhere, O sun, some corner there must be

Thou visitest, where down the strand

Quietly, still, the waves go out to sea

From the green fringes of a pastoral land.

Deep in the orchard-bloom the roof-trees stand,

The brown sheep graze along the bay.

And through the apple-boughs above the sand

The bees’ hum sounds no fainter than the spray.

There through uncounted hours declines the day

To the low arch of twilight’s close,

And, just as night about the moon grows gray,

One sail leans westward to the fading rose.

Giver of dreams, O thou with scatheless wing

Forever moving through the fiery hail,

To flame-seared lids the cooling vision bring

And let some soul go seaward with that sail.

ELEGY
[1918]

Ah, how I pity the young dead who gave

All that they were, and might become, that we

With tired eyes should watch this perfect sea

Reweave its patterning of silver wave

Round scented cliffs of arbutus and bay.

No more shall any rose along the way,

The myrtled way that wanders to the shore,

Nor jonquil-twinkling meadow any more,

Nor the warm lavender that takes the spray,

Smell only of the sea-salt and the sun,

But, through recurring seasons, every one

Shall speak to us with lips the darkness closes,

Shall look at us with eyes that missed the roses,

Clutch us with hands whose work was just begun,

Laid idle now beneath the earth we tread—

And always we shall walk with the young dead—

Ah, how I pity the young dead, whose eyes

Strain through the sod to see these perfect skies,

Who feel the new wheat springing in their stead,

And the lark singing for them overhead!

WITH THE TIDE
[6th January 1919]

Somewhere I read, in an old book whose name

Is gone from me, I read that when the days

Of a man are counted and his business done,

There comes up the shore at evening, with the tide,

To the place where he sits, a boat—

And in the boat, from the place where he sits, he sees

Dim in the dusk, dim and yet so familiar,

The faces of his friends long dead; and knows

They come for him, brought in upon the tide,

To take him where men go at set of day.

Then, rising, with his hands in theirs, he goes

Between them his last steps, that are the first

Of the new life; and with the tide they pass,

Their shaken sail grown small upon the moon.

Often I thought of this, and pictured me

How many a man that lives with throngs about him,

Yet straining in the twilight for that boat

Shall scarce make out one figure in the stern,

And that so faint, its features shall perplex him

With doubtful memories—and his heart hang back.

But others, rising as they see the sail

Increase upon the sunset, hasten down,

Hands out and eyes elated; for they see,

Head over head, crowding from bow to stern,

Repeopling their long loneliness with smiles,

The faces of their friends—and such go out

Content upon the ebb-tide, with safe hearts.

But never

To worker summoned when his day was done

Did mounting tide bear such a freight of friends

As stole to you up the white wintry shingle

That night while those that watched you thought you slept.

Softly they came, and beached the boat, and stood

In the still cove, under the icy stars,

Your last-born and the dear loves of your heart,

And with them all the friends you called by name,

And all men that have loved right more than ease,

And honour above honours; all who gave

Free-handed of their best for other men,

And thought the giving taking; they who knew

Man’s natural state is effort: up and up—

All these were there, so great a company

Perchance you marvelled, wondering what great craft

Had brought that throng unnumbered to the cove

Where the boys used to beach their light canoe

After old happy picnics.

But these your friends and children, to whose hands

Committed in the silent night you rose

And took your last faint steps—

These led you down, O great American,

Down to the winter night and the white beach;

And there you saw that the huge hull that waited

Was not as are the boats of the other dead,

Frail craft for a light passage;

But first of a long line of towering ships,

Storm-worn and Ocean-weary every one,

The ships you launched, the ships you manned, the ships

That now, returning from their sacred quest

With the thrice-sacred burden of their dead,

Lay waiting there to take you forth with them,

Out on the flood-tide, to some farther quest.

LA FOLLE DU LOGIS

Wild wingèd thing, O brought I know not whence

To beat your life out in my life’s low cage;

You strange familiar, nearer than my flesh

Yet distant as a star, that were at first

A child with me a child, yet elfin-far,

And visibly of some unearthly breed;

Mirthfullest mate of all my mortal games,

Yet shedding on them some evasive gleam

Of Latmian loneliness—O even then

Expert to lift the latch of our low door

And profit by the hours when, dusked about

By human misintelligence, we made

Our first weak fledgling flights—

Divine accomplice of those perilous-sweet

Low moth-flights of the unadventured soul

Above the world’s dim garden!—now we sit

After what stretch of years, what stretch of wings,

In the same cage together—still as near

And still as strange!

Only I know at last

That we are fellows till the last night falls,

And that I shall not miss your comrade hands

Till they have closed my lids, and by them set

A taper that—who knows?—may yet shine through.

Sister, my comrade, I have ached for you,

Sometimes, to see you curb your pace to mine,

And bow your Maenad crest to the dull forms

Of human usage; I have loosed your hand

And whispered: “Go! Since I am tethered here”;

And you have turned, and breathing for reply:

“I too am pinioned, as you too are free,”

Have caught me to such undreamed distances

As the last planets see, when they look forth

To the sentinel pacings of the outmost stars—

Nor these alone,

Comrade, my sister, were your gifts. More oft

Has your impalpable wing-brush bared for me

The heart of wonder in familiar things,

Unroofed dull rooms, and hung above my head

The cloudy glimpses of a vernal moon,

Or all the autumn heaven ripe with stars.

And you have made a secret pact with Sleep,

And when she comes not, or her feet delay,

Toiled in low meadows of gray asphodel

Under a pale sky where no shadows fall,

Then, hooded like her, to my side you steal,

And the night grows like a great rumouring sea,

And you a boat, and I your passenger,

And the tide lifts us with an indrawn breath

Out, out upon the murmurs and the scents,

Through spray of splintered star-beams, or white rage

Of desperate moon-drawn waters—on and on

To some blue sea’s unalterable calm

That ever like a slow-swung mirror rocks

The balanced breasts of sea-birds....

Yet other nights, my sister, you have been

The storm, and I the leaf that fled on it

Terrifically down voids that never knew

The pity of creation—till your touch

Has drawn me back to earth, as, in the dusk,

A scent of lilac from an unseen hedge

Bespeaks the hidden farm, the bedded cows,

And safety, and the sense of human kind....

And I have climbed with you by secret ways

To meet the dews of morning, and have seen

The shy gods like retreating shadows fade,

Or on the thymy reaches have surprised

Old Chiron sleeping, and have waked him not....

Yet farther have I fared with you, and known

Love and his sacred tremors, and the rites

Of his most inward temple; and beyond

Have seen the long grey waste where lonely thoughts

Listen and wander where a city stood.

And creeping down by waterless defiles

Under an iron midnight, have I kept

My vigil in the waste till dawn began

To walk among the ruins, and I saw

A sapling rooted in a fissured plinth,

And a wren’s nest in the thunder-threatening hand

Of some old god of granite....

THE FIRST YEAR
[ALL SOULS’ DAY]

(i)

Here in my darkness

I lie in the depths of things,

As in a black wood whereof flowers and boughs are the roots,

And the moist-branching tendrils and ligaments,

Woven or spiralled or spreading, the roof of my head,

Blossomless, birdless, starless, skied with black earth,

A ponderous heaven.

But they forget,

Too often forget, and too soon, who above us

Brush the dead leaves from our mounds,

Scrape the moss from our names,

And feel safe,

They forget that one day in the year our earth becomes ether,

And the roots binding us loosen

As Peter’s chains dropped for the Angel,

In that old story they read there;

Forget—do they seek to remember?—

That one day in the year we are with them,

Rejoin them, hear them, behold them, and walk the old ways with them—

One!

To-morrow....

And already I feel

The harsh arms of ivy-coils loosening

Like a dead man’s embrace,

I feel the cool worms from my hair

Rain like dew,

And the soft-muzzled moles boring deeper,

Down after the old dead that stir not,

Or just grumble: “Don’t wake me,” and turn

The nether side of their skulls to their head-slab....

While I ... I their one-year neighbour,

Thrusting up like a willow in spring,

From my hair

Untwine the thick grass-hair carefully,

Unbind the cool roots from my lids,

Straining up, straining up with thin hands,

Scattering the earth like a cloud,

And stopping my ears from the cry,

Lower down,

Persistent, like a sick child’s wail,

The cry of the girl just below me:

“Don’t go, don’t go ...” the poor coward!

(ii)

How light the air is!

I’m dizzy ... my feet fly up ...

And this mad confusion of things topsy-turvey,

With the friendly comprehensible roots all hidden,

In this queer world where one can’t see how things happen,

But only what they become....

Was it always so queer and inexplicable?

Yes, but the fresh smell of things ...

Are these apples in the wet grass, I wonder?

Sweet, sweet, sweet, the smell of the living!

And the far-off sky, and the stars,

And the quiet spaces between,

So that one can float and fly ...

Why used we only to walk?

This is the gate—and the latch still unmended!

Yet how often I told him.... Ah, the scent of my box-border!

And a late clove-pink still unfrozen.

It’s what they call a “mild November” ...

I knew that, below there, by the way the roots kept pushing,

But I’d forgotten how tender it was on the earth ...

So quickly the dead forget!

And the living? I think, after all, they remember,

With everything about them so unchanged,

And no leaden loam on their eyes.

Yes, surely, I know he remembers;

Whenever he touches the broken latch,

He thinks: “How often she asked me,

And how careless I was not to mend it!”

And smiles and sighs; then recalls

How we planted the box-border together,

Knee to knee in the wet, one November ...

And the clove-pinks—

Here is the window.

They’ve put the green lamp on the table,

Where his books lie, heaped as of old—

Ah, thank God for the old disorder!

How I used to hate it, and now—

Now I could kiss the dust on the mirror, the pipe-ashes

Over everything—all the old mess

That no strange hand interferes with ...

Bless him for that!

(iij)

Just at first

This much contents me; why should I peer

Past the stripped arms of the rose, the metallic

Rattle of clematis dry as my hair,

There where June flushes and purples the window like sunset? I know

So well the room’s other corner: the hearth

Where autumn logs smoulder,

The hob,

The kettle, the crane, the cushion he put for my feet,

And my Chair—

O Chair, always mine!

Do I dare?

What—the room so the same, his and mine,

Not a book changed, the inkstand uncleaned,

The old pipe-burn scarring the table,

The old rent in the rug, where I tripped

And he caught me—no woman’s hand here

Has mended or marred; all’s the same!

Why not dare, then? Oh, but to think,

If I stole to my chair, if I sat there,

Feet folded, arms stretched on the arms,

So quiet,

And waited for night and his coming ...

Oh, think, when he came

And sank in the other chair, facing me,

Not a line of his face would alter,

Nor his hands fall like sun on my hair,

Nor the old dog jump on me, grinning

Yet cringing, because she half-knew

I’d found out the hole in my border,

And why my tallest auratum was dead—

But his face would be there, unseeing,

His eyes look through me;

And the old dog—not pausing

At her bowl for a long choking drink,

Or to bite the burrs from her toes, and stretch

Sideward to the fire, dreaming over their tramp in the stubble—

Would creep to his feet

Bristling a little ...

And I,

I should be there, in the old place,

All the old life bubbling up in me,

And to him no more felt than the sap

Struggling up unseen in the clematis—

Ah, then, then, then I were dead!

But what was I, then? Lips and hands only—

Since soul cannot reach him without them?

Oh, heavy grave of the flesh,

Did I never once reach to him through you?

I part the branches and look....

(iv)

O my Chair ...

But who sits in you? One like me

Aflame yet invisible!

Only I, with eyes death-anointed,

Can see her young hair, and the happy heart riding

The dancing sea of her breast!

Then she too is waiting—

And young as I was?

Was she always there?

Were her lips between all our kisses?

Did her hands know the folds of his hair?

Did she hear what I said when I loved him?

Was the room never empty? Not once?

When I leaned in that chair, which one of us two did he see?

Did he feel us both on his bosom?

How strange! If I spoke to her now she would hear me,

She alone ...

Would tell me all, through her weeping,

Or rise up and curse me, perhaps—

As I might her, were she living!

But since she is dead, I will go—

Go home, and leave them together ...

I will go back to my dungeon,

Go back, and never return;

Lest another year, in my chair,

I find one sitting,

One whom he sees, and the old dog fears not, but springs on ...

I will not suffer what she must have suffered, but creep

To my bed in the dark,

And mind how the girl below called to me,

Called up through the mould and the grave-slabs:

“Do not go! Do not go! Do not go!”

ALTERNATIVE EPITAPHS

“—— of heart-failure.”

(i)

Death touched me where your head had lain.

What other spot could he have found

So tender to receive a wound,

So versed in all the arts of pain?

(ii)

Love came, and gave me wind and sun,

Love went, and left me light and air.

Nor gave he anything more fair

Than what I found when he was gone.

HERE END THE TWELVE POEMS BY EDITH WHARTON, PRINTED IN THE RICCARDI PRESS FOUNT AT THE CHISWICK PRESS FOR THE MEDICI SOCIETY, LONDON. MDCCCCXXVI

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

• Typos fixed; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.