[PART I]
[Ballad of a Lost House]
[PART II]
[Duet]
[I’ll be your Epitaph]
[Third Floor Landing]
[Therapy]
[Witch!]
[Deep Sea Fishing]
[Onlooker]
[Affinity]
[Cantares]
[She says, being forbidden:]
[Little Lover]
[Kleptomaniac]
[To a Song of Sappho discovered in Egypt]
[Hyacinths]
[The Story as I understand It]
[Two Passionate Ones Part]
[This City Wind]
[PART III]
[October Trees]
[New England Cottage]
[Migration]
[Sand-pipings]
[King’s Garden]
[Abrigada]
[PART IV]
[ITALIAN QUATRAINS]
[Naples]
[Pompeii]
[Rome]
[Paganini’s Violins]
[Bavarian Roadside]
[“Hark! Hark!”]
[Bagpipe Player]
[Oberammergau]
[One Version]
[Protest in Passing]
[Saul! Saul!]
[PART V]
[Fiddler’s Farewell]
[PART VI]
[Of Mountains]
[CONTENTS]

FIDDLER’S FAREWELL

LEONORA SPEYER

FIDDLER’S FAREWELL

NEW YORK

ALFRED · A · KNOPF

MCMXXVI

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO MY HUSBAND

“His smile, it listens well and long,

His sadness, charitable to mirth,

His silence, hospitable to song.”

No words to cover:

Soft linen, trailing silk of phrase

To deck the pampered song;

Fine feathers to the wing

For deft adventuring

Ecstatic ways

Along.

No many-colored coat of precious words!

Rather to dare

A stark undress,

Wear but a crying nakedness,

Venture the bright discomfort

Of a word that strips—

The startled candor of the heart

Bare on the vehement lips.

PART I

Ballad of a Lost House

Hungry Heart, Hungry Heart, where have you been?

I’ve been to a town where lives a queen.

Hungry Heart, Hungry Heart, what did you there?

I ran all the way to a certain Square.

Hungry Heart, say what you did that for!

To find a street and a certain door;

And there I knocked my knuckles sore.

That was a foolish thing to do,

Alone in the night the long hours through;

Gaping there like a chalky clown

At a stranger-door that had been your own.

Where was your pluck and where your pride?

They both were there, and love beside;

And suddenly the door swung wide.

I heard the sound of a violin

That seemed to bid me enter in:

For a fiddle’s a key for many a lock,

And will open a door though it’s built in rock.

III

Tell me, Hungry, what did you see?

A lighted hall where friends made free.

I trod with them a well-known stair—

How did you dare, Heart! How did you dare?

For a frowning face you may trust and like,

But who shall say when a smile will strike?

Up the oaken stair went I,

And all made way to let me by.

Some reached a hand and some looked down,

But I never saw their smile nor frown.

I never saw familiar things

That sought me with quaint beckonings:

The carven saints in postures mild,

Kind Virgins with the Heavenly Child,

Ladies and Knights in tapestries—

I never saw nor looked at these.

Only the Christ from a canvas dim,

Drooping there on His leafless Limb;

He looked at me and I looked at Him.

Where did you go, old Unafraid?

Up to a place where children played—

The happy hubbub the small three made!

Patter and prattle and toys and games,

Dolls in rows with curious names,

Voices lifted like high thin tunes,

Lively suppers with round-tipped spoons!

Where should I go but up the stair

To the welcome I knew was waiting there?

But all was dark, as only can be

A long deserted nursery;

And never a sound to succor me.

So I turned to a room where a woman slept

In a gay gold bed, and near I crept,

And lingered and listened—oh anguished morn,

Oh fluty cry of a babe new-born,

Clearer than trumpeting Gabriel’s horn!

Oh sea of Life, with Love for a chart—

On with the tale, old Hungry Heart!

VII

On with the tale and on to a door

Where a man had passed to pass no more:

A quiet man with a quiet strength,

And over the threshold his shadow’s length

Lay like an answer for Time to weigh;

And the dust from his feet spread thick and gray.

And I thought: Well shaken! Let friend or foe

Sweep up the dust an it please them so;

Let Lord and Valet tend to the room;

Lady, and House-maid, here with the broom!

Bid Town and Tattle see to it too

That the windows be washed of the mud they threw.

Dust and ashes of what has been!

Sweep the clean house. And keep it clean.

VIII

I thought to curse—but strange, a prayer

Rose to my lips as I stood there.

And this my praying: Now all good cheer

To him who sleeps where slept my dear,

For the sake of the good dreams once dreamed here.

Back to the stair and down I sped,

Passing a loud room table-spread;

Passing, but pausing, as house-wives do,

Judging the viands that came to view;

Trusting the sauce was tuned to the meat,

The wine well cooled and the pudding sweet;

Pausing, but passing—

Stay, Heart of mine,

What of the guests? For I divine

Their looks were grand and their manners fine.

A goodly company, I’ll admit,

And some had beauty and some had wit—

And some you loved?

Well, what of it?

And some loved you!

Perhaps, perhaps,

With linen napkins in their laps,

With cups that foamed and piled-up plates;

They loved me with a hundred hates!

They hated in such lovely ways,

With laughter, singing, kisses, praise—

How could I know? How could I know?

Hungry Heart, Hungry Heart, cry not so!

And as I lingered watching them,

I felt a tugging at my hem;

My little dog was cowering there,

A glassy terror in its stare;

My veins turned ice—O smacking lips,

O dainty greedy finger-tips!

’Twas bones of Hungry Heart they ate,

Broken and boiled and delicate,

Platter on platter the board along,

And as they supped they sang a song:

An ancient ardent melody

About a lady passing by

Whom they must love until they die.

XII

And as they drank I saw the wine,

It never came from ripened vine,

It never was brewed in tub or vat,

Knew web of spider or squeak of rat—

But it knows their thirst and it pours for that.

A thirsty stream that none may gauge,

That none shall slake though the stream assuage,

Of wine the very counterpart,

Out of the side of Hungry Heart.

And mixed with the toast, a violin,

Mellow and merry above the din,

Held shoulder high ’neath a woman’s chin.

XIII

Hungry Heart, come, make haste, make haste,

Out of the house of hopes laid waste,

Out of the town of teeth laid bare

Under its smiling debonair.

Wait not, weep not, get you gone,

Better the stones to rest upon,

The wind and the rain for a roof secure,

Hyssop and tares for your nouriture:

These shall endure. These shall endure.

XIV

I got me gone. On stumbling feet

I reached the stair and I reached the street;

The door slammed to with an iron scream,

And behind it lay the end of a dream;

Behind it lifted barren walls,

And I thought of a play when the curtain falls

On a comedy written of shrouds and palls.

Hungry Heart, Hungry Heart, what did you then?

I fell on my knees and I cried, Amen!

But now and again—now and again—

I come to the door in the dead of night,

I wander the rooms till the panes are white;

A landlord ghost! Aye, one who knows

His lease out-lived with the cock that crows,

A wraith content that contented goes.

Goes at the cry of the bird unseen,

Calling the friends of what has been;

And some it names lie sleeping near—

Ah, wake them not, friend Chanticleer!

XVI

Three times it calls the end of the dream,

And still I return, for still I seem

To comfort a house that lives aloof

From all who live beneath its roof.

I must return! to dispossess

Those bartered walls of loneliness:

Mortar and brick and iron and bole,

Where all may pass who pay their toll;

The husk of a house that has lost its soul.

XVII

For out of that house went its soul with me,

Leaping and crying after me,

To bear me faithful company

Over a clear and quickening sea.

PART II

Duet

(I sing with myself)

Out of my sorrow

I’ll build a stair,

And every to-morrow

Will climb to me there—

With ashes of yesterday

In its hair.

My fortune is made

Of a stab in the side,

My debts are paid

In pennies of pride—

Little red coins

In a heart I hide.

The stones that I eat

Are ripe for my needs,

My cup is complete

With the dregs of deeds—

Clear are the notes

Of my broken reeds.

I carry my pack

Of aches and stings,

Light with the lack

Of all good things—

But not on my back,

Because of my wings!

I’ll be your Epitaph

Over your dear dead heart I’ll lift

As blithely as a bough,

Saying, “Here lies the cruel song,

Cruelly quiet now.”

I’ll say, “Here lies the lying sword,

Still dripping with my truth;

Here lies the woven sheath I made,

Embroidered with my youth.”

I’ll sing, “Here lies, here lies, here lies—”

Ah, rust in peace below!

Passers will wonder at my words,

But your dark dust will know.

Third Floor Landing

A stranger knocked upon your door,

A stranger-voice cried out, “Come in!”

Beyond, a sofa, plump and red,

Crouched where a carven chest had been.

I craned to see the things I knew

Could not be there, since you were gone—

Oh twilight of the household gods,

Dishonored altars where they shone!

I saw instead a gilded glimpse

Of trivial things that seemed to shout

A trivial welcome from the wall;

The door swung to and shut me out.

Only the landing was unchanged,

The closed door donned a friendly air;

I had no quarrel with my place,

I was at home upon the stair.

Therapy

There is a way

Of healing love with love,

They say.

But I say no!

What! shall pain comfort pain,

Fever calm fever,

Woe minister to woe?

Shall tear, remembering,

Wash cool remembering tear?

Shall scar play host to scar,

Loneliness shelter loneliness;

And is forgetting here?

Poor patch-work of the heart,

This healing love with love;

Binding the wound to wound,

The smart to smart!

Grafting the dream upon the other dream

As a gardener grafts tree to tree,

And both from the same wild root

Bearing their bitter fruit:

The new dream dreaming in the old,

The old dream in the new—

And neither dreaming true.

Is there, I wonder,

A heaven above the heaven we knew?

And is there under

Our dream’s stern waking

A sterner hell?

And shall we know them too?

One thing I know: