Читать книгу Poems - Cawein Madison Julius - Страница 18

  He lived beyond men, and so stood

  Admitted to the brotherhood

  Of beauty:—dreams, with which he trod

  Companioned like some sylvan god.

  And oft men wondered, when his thought

  Made all their knowledge seem as naught,

  If he, like Uther's mystic son,

  Had not been born for Avalon.

  When wandering mid the whispering trees,

  His soul communed with every breeze;

  Heard voices calling from the glades,

  Bloom-words of the Leimoniäds;

  Or Dryads of the ash and oak,

  Who syllabled his name and spoke

  With him of presences and powers

  That glimpsed in sunbeams, gloomed in showers.

  By every violet-hallowed brook,

  Where every bramble-matted nook

  Rippled and laughed with water sounds,

  He walked like one on sainted grounds,

  Fearing intrusion on the spell

  That kept some fountain-spirit's well,

  Or woodland genius, sitting where

  Red, racy berries kissed his hair.

  Once when the wind, far o'er the hill,

  Had fall'n and left the wildwood still

  For Dawn's dim feet to trail across,—

  Beneath the gnarled boughs, on the moss,

  The air around him golden-ripe

  With daybreak,—there, with oaten pipe,

  His eyes beheld the wood-god, Pan,

  Goat-bearded, horned; half brute, half man;

  Who, shaggy-haunched, a savage rhyme

  Blew in his reed to rudest time;

  And swollen-jowled, with rolling eye—

  Beneath the slowly silvering sky,

  Whose rose streaked through the forest's roof—

  Danced, while beneath his boisterous hoof

  The branch was snapped, and, interfused

  Between gnarled roots, the moss was bruised.

  And often when he wandered through

  Old forests at the fall of dew—

  A new Endymion, who sought

  A beauty higher than all thought—

  Some night, men said, most surely he

  Would favored be of deity:

  That in the holy solitude

  Her sudden presence, long-pursued,

  Unto his gaze would stand confessed:

  The awful moonlight of her breast

  Come, high with majesty, and hold

  His heart's blood till his heart grew cold,

  Unpulsed, unsinewed, all undone,

  And snatch his soul to Avalon.