Читать книгу Days and Dreams: Poems - Cawein Madison Julius - Страница 2

Herein the dearness of her is:

The thirty perfect days of June

Made one, in beauty and in bliss

Were not more white to have to kiss,

To love not more in tune.

And oft I think she is too true,

Too innocent for our day;

For in her eyes her soul looks new —

Two crowfoot-blossoms watchet-blue

Are not more soft than they.

So good, so kind is she to me,

In darling ways and happy words,

Sometimes my heart fears she may be

Too much with God and secretly

Sweet sister to the birds.

The owls are quavering, two, now three,

And all the green is graying;

The owls our trysting dials be —

There is no time for staying.

I wait you where this buckeye throws

Its tumbled shadow over

Wood-violet and the bramble-rose,

Long lady-fern and clover.

Spice-seeded sassafras weighs deep

Rough rail and broken paling,

Where all day long the lizards sleep

Like lichen on the railing.

Behind you you will feel the moon's

Gold stealing like young laughter;

And mists – gray ghosts of picaroons —

Its phantom treasure after.

And here together, youth and youth,

Love will be doubly able;

Each be to each as true as truth,

And dear as fairy fable.

The owls are calling and the maize

With fallen dew is dripping —

Ah, girlhood, through the dewy haze

Come like a moonbeam slipping.

There is a fading inward of the day,

And all the pansy sunset hugs one star;

To eastward dwindling all the land is gray,

While barley meadows westward smoulder far.

Now to your glass will you pass

For the last time?

Pass,

Humming that ballad we know? —

Here while I wait it is late

And is past time —

Late,

And love's hours they go, they go.

There is a drawing downward of the night;

The wedded Heaven wends married to the Moon;

Above, the heights hang golden in her light,

Below, the woods bathe dewy in the June.

There through the dew is it you

Coming lawny?

You,

Or a moth in the vines?

You! – at your throat I may note

Twinkling tawny,

Note,

A glow-worm, your brooch that shines.

How many smiles in the asking? —

Herein I can not deceive you;

My "yes" in a "no" was a-masking,

Nor thought, dear, once to grieve you.

I hid. The humming-bird happiness here

Danced up i' the blood … but what are words

When the speech of two souls all truth affords?

Affirmative, negative what in love's ear? —

I wished to say "yes" and somehow said "no";

The woman within me knew you would know,

For it held you six times dear.

So many hopes in a wooing! —

Therein you could not deceive me;

The heart was here and the hope pursuing,

Knew that you loved, believe me. —

Bunched bells o' the blush pomegranate – to fix

At your throat; three drops of fire they are;

And the maiden moon and the maiden star

Sink silvery over yon meadow ricks.

Will you look? – till I hug your head back, so —

For I know it is "yes" though you whisper "no," —

And my kisses, sweet, are six.

Could I recall every joy that befell me

There in the past with its anguish and bliss,

Here in my heart it has whispered to tell me,

These were no joys to this.

Were it not well if our love could forget them,

Veiling the was with the dawn of the is?

Dead with the past we should never regret them,

These were no joys to this.

When they were gone and the present stood speechful,

Ardent with word and with look and with kiss,

What though we know that their eyes are beseechful,

These were no joys to this.

Is it not well to have more of the spirit,

Living high futures this earthly must miss?

Less of the flesh with the past pining near it? —

Such is the joy of this.

We will leave reason,

Dear, for a season;

Reason were treason

Since yonder nether

Foot-hills are clad now

In nothing sad now;

We will be glad now,

Glad as this weather.

Heart and heart! in the Maytime, Maytime,

Youth and Love take playtime, playtime …

I in the dairy; you are the airy

Majesty passing; Love is the fairy

Bringing us two together.

Starlight in masses

Of mist that passes,

Stars in the grasses;

Star-bud and flower

Laughingly know us;

Secretly show us

Earth is below us

And for the hour

Soul has soul. In the Maytime, Maytime,

Youth and Love take playtime, playtime …

You are a song; a singer I hear it

Whispered in star and in flower; the spirit,

Love, is the power.

And say we can not wed us now,

Since roses and the June are here,

Meseems, beneath the beechen bough

'T is just as sweet, my doubly dear,

To swear anew each old love vow,

And love another year.

When breathe green woodlands through and through

Wild scents of heliotrope and rain,

Where deep the moss mounds cool with dew,

Beyond the barley-blowing lane,

More wise than wedding, is to woo —

So we will woo again.

All night I lie awake and mark

The hours by no clanging clock,

But in the dim and dewy dark

Far crowing of some punctual cock;

Until the lyric of the lark

Mounts and Morn's gates unlock.

And would you be a nun and miss

All this delightful ache of love?

Not have the moon for what she is?

Love's honey-horn God holds above —

No world, for worlds are in a kiss

If worlds are good enough.

So say we can not wed us now,

Since roses and the June are here

We 'll stroll beneath the doddered bough,

Heaven's mated songsters singing near,

To swear anew each old love vow,

And love another year.

And had we lived in the days

Of the Khalif Haroun er Reshid,

We had loved, as the story says,

Did the Sultan's favorite one

And the Persian Emperor's son

Ali ben Bekkar, he

Of the Kisra dynasty.

Do you know the story well

Of the Khalif Haroun's sultana? —

When night on the palace fell,

A slave through a secret door,

Low-arched on the Tigris' shore,

By a hidden winding stair

Ben Bekkar brought to his fair?

Then there was laughter and mirth,

And feasting and singing together,

In a chamber of marvellous worth;

In a chamber vaulted high

On columns of ivory;

Its dome, like the irised skies,

Mooned over with peacock eyes;

And the curtains and furniture,

Damask and juniper.

Ten slave-girls – so many blooms —

Stand sconcing tamarisk torches,

Silk-clad from the Irak looms;

Ten handmaidens serve the feast,

Each like to a star in the East;

Ten singers, their lutes a-tune,

Each like to a bosomed moon.

For her in the stuff of Merv

Blue-clad, unveiled, and jewelled,

No metaphor made may serve;

Scarved deep with her own dark hair,

The jewels like fire-flies there —

Blossom and moon and star,

The Lady Shemsennehar.

The zone embracing her waist, —

The ransom of forty princes, —

But her form more priceless is placed;

Carbuncles of Istakhar

In her coronet burning are —

Though gems of the Jamshid race,

Far rarer the gem of her face.

Tall-shaped like the letter I,

With a face like an Orient morning;

Eyes of the bronze-black sky;

Lips, of the pomegranate split,

With the light of her language lit;

Cheeks, which the young blood dares

Make blood-red anemone lairs.

Kohled with voluptuous look,

From opaline casting-bottles,

Handmaidens over them shook

Rose-water, and strewed with bloom

Mosaics old of the room;

Torch-rays on the walls made bars,

Or minted down golden dinars.

Roses of Rocknabad,

Hyacinths of Bokhara; —

Not a spray of cypress sad; —

Narcissus and jessamine o'er

Carved pillar and cedarn door;

Pomegranates and bells of clear

Tulips of far Kashmeer.

And the chamber glows like a flower

Of the Tuba, or vale of El Liwa;

And the bronzen censers glower;

And scents of ambergris pour

With myrrh brought out of Lahore,

And musk of Khoten, and good

Aloes and sandal-wood.

Rubies, a tragacanth-red,

Angered in armlet and anklet

Dragon-like eyes that bled:

Bangles and necklaces dangled

Diamonds, whose prisms were angled,

Over veil and from coiffure, each

Or apricot-colored or peach.

And Ghoram now smites her lute,

Sings loves of Mejnoon and Leila,

Or amorous ghazals may suit: —

And the flambeaux snap and wave

Barbaric on free and slave,

Rich fabrics and bezels of gems,

And roses in anadems.

Sherbets in ewers of gold,

Fruits in salvers carnelian;

Flagons of grotesque mold,

Made of a sapphire glass,

Stained with wine of Shirâz;

Shaddock and melon and grape

On plate of an antique shape:

Vases of frost and of rose,

An alabaster graven,

Filled with the mountain snows;

Goblets of mother-of-pearl,

One filigree silver-swirl;

Vessels of gold foamed up

With spray of spar on the cup. —

When a slave bursts in with the cry:

"The eunuchs! the Khalif's eunuchs!

With scimitars bared draw nigh!

Wesif and Afif and he,

Chief of the hideous three,

Mesrour! the Sultan 's seen

'Mid a hundred weapons' sheen!"…

We, never had parted, no!

As parted those lovers fearful;

But kissing you so and so,

When they came they had found us dead

On the flowers our blood dyed red;

Our lips together and

The dagger in my hand.

O cities built by music! lyres of love

Strung to a songful sea! did I but own

One harp chord of one broken barbiton

What had I budded for our life thereof?

In docile shadows under bluebell skies

A home upon the poppied edge of eve,

Beneath lone peaks the splendors never leave,

In lemon orchards whence the egret flies.

Where pitying gray the pitiless eyes of Death

Blight no slight bud unfostered, I have thought;

Deep, lily-deep, pearl-pale daturas, fraught

With dewy fragrance like an angel's breath.

Sleep in the days; the twilights tuned and tame

Through mockbirds throating to attentive stars;

Each morn outrivalling each in opal bars;

Eves preaching beauty with rose-tongues of flame.

O country by the undiscovered sea!

The dream infolds thee and the way is dim —

With head not high, what if I follow him,

Love – with the madness and the melody?

An elf there is who stables the hot

Red wasp that stings o' the apricot;

An elf who rowels his spiteful bay,

Like a mote on a ray, away, away;

An elf who saddles the hornet lean

To din i' the ear o' the swinging bean;

Who hunts with a hat cocked half awry

The bottle-blue o' the dragon-fly: —

O ho, O hi! Oh, well know I.

An elf there is where the clover tips

A horn whence the summer leaks and drips,

Where lanthorns of mustard-flowers bloom,

In the dusk awaits the bee's dull boom;

Gay gold brocade from head to knee,

Who robs the caravan bumble-bee;

Big bags of honey bee-merchants pay

To the bandit elf of the Fairy way, —

O ho, O hey! I have heard them say.

Another ouphen the butterflies know,

Who paints their wings like the buds that blow;

Flowers, staining the dew-drops through,

Seals their colors in tubes of dew;

Colors to dazzle the butterflies' wing —

The evening moth is another thing:

The butterfly's glory he got at dawn,

The moon-moth's got when the moon was wan;

He it is, that the hollyhocks hear,

Who dangles a brilliant i' each one's ear;

Teases at noon the pane's green fly,

And lights at night the glow-worm's eye: —

O ho, O hi! Oh, well know I.

But the dearest elf, so the poets say,

Is the elf who hides in an eye of gray;

Who curls in a dimple and slips along

The strings of a lute or a lover's song;

Shines in a scent, or wings a rhyme,

And laughs in the bells of a wedding chime;

Hides unhidden, where none may know,

In her bosom's blossom or throat's blue bow —

O ho, O ho! – a friend or foe?

Who the loser, who the winner,

If the Fancy fail as preacher? —

None who loved was yet beginner

Though another's love-beseecher;

Love's revealment 's of the inner

Life and deity, the teacher.

Who may falsify the feeling

To the lover who is loser?

Has she felt: – the mere revealing

Of the passion 's his accuser;

She conceals it; the concealing

Is her own love's self-abuser.

One hath said, no flower knoweth

Of the fragrance it revealeth;

Song, its soul that overfloweth,

Never nightingale's heart feeleth —

Such the love the spirit groweth,

Love unconscious if it healeth.

Handsels of anemones

The surrendered hours

Pour about the sweet Spring's knees —

Crowding babies of the breeze,

Her unstudied flowers.

When 't is dawn, bestowing Day

Strews with coins of golden

Every furlong of his way —

Like a Sultan gone to pray

At a Kaaba olden.

Warlock Night, when dips the dark,

Opens, tire on tire,

Windows of an heavenly ark,

Whence the stars swarm, spark on spark,

Butterflies of fire.

With the night, the day, the spring, —

Godly chords of beauty, —

We the instrument will string

Of our lives and love shall sing

Songs of truth and duty.

How it was I can not tell,

For I know not where nor why,

And the beautiful befell

In a land that does not lie

East or West where mortals dwell —

But beneath a vaguer sky.

Was it in the golden ages,

Or the iron, that I heard,

In prophetic speech of sages,

How had come a snowy bird

'Neath whose wing lay written pages

Of an unknown lover's word?

I forget; you may remember

How the earthquake shook our ships;

How our city, one huge ember,

Blazed within the thick eclipse;

When you found me – deep December

Sealed on icy eyes and lips.

I forget. No one may say

Pre-existences are true:

Here 's a flower dies to-day,

Resurrected blooms anew:

Death is dumb and Life is gray —

Who shall doubt what God can do!

As to this, nothing to tell,

You being all my belief;

Doubt may not enter or dwell

Here where your image is chief,

Royal, to quicken or quell,

Swaying no sceptre of grief.

Wise with the wisdom of Spring —

Dew-drops, a world in each prism,

Gems from the universe ring: —

Free of all creed and all schism,

Buds that are speechless but bring

God-uttered God aphorism.

See how the synod is met

There of the planets to preach us —

Freed from the frost's oubliette,

Here how the flowers beseech us —

Were it not well to forget

Winter and night as they teach us?

Dew-drop, a bud, and a star,

These – each a separate thought

Over man's logic how far! —

God to a unit hath wrought —

Love, making these what they are,

For without love they were naught.

Millions of stars; and they roll

Over your path that is white,

Here where we end the long stroll. —

Seen of the innermost sight,

All of the love of my soul

Kisses your spirit. Good-night.