Panthea

    • Nay, let us walk from fire unto fire,
    • From passionate pain to deadlier delight,-
    • I am too young to live without desire,
    • Too young art thou to waste this summer night
    • Asking those idle questions which of old
    • Man sought of seer and oracle, and no reply was told.
    • For sweet, to feel is better than to know,
    • And wisdom is a childless heritage,
    • One pulse of passion-youth’s first fiery glow,-
    • Are worth the hoarded proverbs of the sage:
    • Vex not thy soul with dead philosophy,
    • Have we not lips to kiss with, hearts to love, and eyes
    • to see!
    • Dost thou not hear the murmuring nightingale
    • Like water bubbling from a silver jar,
    • So soft she sings the envious moon is pale,
    • That high in heaven she hung so far
    • She cannot hear that love-enraptured tune,-
    • Mark how she wreathes each horn with mist, yon late
    • and laboring moon.
    • White lilies, in whose cups the gold bees dream,
    • The fallen snow of petals where the breeze
    • Scatters the chestnut blossom, or the gleam
    • Of all our endless sins, our vain endeavour
    • Enough for thee, dost thou desire more?
    • Alas! the Gods will give naught else from their
    • eternal store.
    • For our high Gods have sick and wearied grown
    • Of boyish limbs in water,- are not these
    • For wasted days of youth to make atone
    • By pain or prayer or priest, and never, never,
    • Hearken they now to either good or ill,
    • But send their rain upon the just and the unjust at will.
    • They sit at ease, our Gods they sit at ease,
    • Strewing with leaves of rose their scented wine,
    • They sleep, they sleep, beneath the rocking trees
    • Where asphodel and yellow lotus twine,
    • Mourning the old glad days before they knew
    • What evil things the heart of man could dream, and
    • dreaming do.
    • And far beneath the brazen floor, they see
    • Like swarming flies the crowd of little men,
    • The bustle of small lives, then wearily
    • Back to their lotus-haunts they turn again
    • Kissing each other’s mouths, and mix more deep
    • The poppy-seeded draught which brings soft
    • purple-lidded sleep.
    • There all day long the golden-vestured sun,
    • Their torch-bearer, stands with his torch a-blaze,
    • And when the gaudy web of noon is spun
    • By its twelve maidens through the crimson haze
    • Fresh from Endymion’s arms comes forth the moon,
    • And the immortal Gods in toils of mortal passions swoon.
    • There walks Queen Juno through some dewy mead,
    • Her grand white feet flecked with the saffron dust
    • Of wind-stirred lilies, while young Ganymede
    • Leaps in the hot and amber-foaming must,
    • His curls all tossed, as when the eagle bare
    • The frightened boy from Ida through the blue Ionian air.
    • There in the green heart of some garden close
    • Queen Venus with the shepherd at her side,
    • Her warm soft body like the brier rose
    • Which would be white yet blushes at its pride,
    • Laughs low for love, till jealous Salmacis
    • Peers through the myrtle-leaves and sighs for pain of
    • lonely bliss.
    • There never does that dreary northwind blow
    • Which leaves our English forests bleak and bare,
    • Nor ever falls the swift white-feathered snow,
    • Nor doth the red-toothed lightning ever dare
    • To wake them in the silver-fretted night
    • When we lie weeping for some sweet sad sin, some dead
    • delight.
    • Alas! they know the far Lethaean spring,
    • The violet-hidden waters well they know,
    • Where one whose feet with tired wandering
    • Are faint and broken may take heart and go,
    • And from those dark depths cool and crystalline
    • Drink, and draw balm, and sleep for sleepless souls,
    • and anodyne.
    • But we oppress our natures, God or Fate
    • Is our enemy, we starve and feed
    • On vain repentance- O we are born too late!
    • What balm for us in bruised poppy seed
    • Who crowd into one finite pulse of time
    • The joy of infinite love and the fierce pain of
    • infinite crime.
    • O we are wearied of this sense of guilt,
    • Wearied of pleasures paramour despair,
    • Wearied of every temple we have built,
    • Wearied of every right, unanswered prayer,
    • For man is weak; God sleeps: and heaven is high:
    • One fiery-colored moment: one great love: and lo!
    • we die.
    • Ah! but no ferry-man with laboring pole
    • Nears his black shallop to the flowerless strand,
    • No little coin of bronze can bring the soul
    • Over Death’s river to the sunless land,
    • Victim and wine and vow are all in vain,
    • The tomb is sealed; the soldiers watch; the dead
    • rise not again.
    • We are resolved into the supreme air,
    • We are made one with what we touch and see,
    • With our heart’s blood each crimson sun is fair,
    • With our young lives each spring-impassioned tree
    • Flames into green, the wildest beasts that range
    • The moor our kinsmen are, all life is one, and all
    • is change.
    • With beat of systole and of diastole
    • One grand great light throbs through earth’s giant heart,
    • And mighty waves of single Being roll
    • From nerve-less germ to man, for we are part
    • Of every rock and bird and beast and hill,
    • One with the things that prey on us, and one with what we kill.
    • From lower cells of waking life we pass
    • To full perfection; thus the world grows old:
    • We who are godlike now were once a mass
    • Of quivering purple flecked with bars of gold,
    • Unsentient or of joy or misery,
    • And tossed in terrible tangles of some wild and
    • wind-swept sea.
    • This hot hard flame with which our bodies burn
    • Will make some meadow blaze with daffodil,
    • Ay! and those argent breasts of thine will turn
    • To water-lilies; the brown fields men till
    • Will be more fruitful for our love to-night,
    • Nothing is lost in nature, all things live in
    • Death’s despite.
    • The boy’s first kiss, the hyacinth’s first bell,
    • The man’s last passion, and the last red spear
    • That from the lily leaps, the asphodel
    • Which will not let its blossoms blow for fear
    • Of too much beauty, and the timid shame
    • Of the young bridegroom at his lover’s eyes,- these
    • with the same
    • One sacrament are consecrate, the earth
    • Not we alone hath passions hymeneal,
    • The yellow buttercups that shake for mirth
    • At daybreak know a pleasure not less real
    • Than we do, when in some fresh-blossoming wood
    • We draw the spring into our hearts, and feel that
    • life is good.
    • So when men bury us beneath the yew
    • Thy crimson-stained mouth a rose will be,
    • And thy soft eyes lush bluebells dimmed with dew,
    • And when the white narcissus wantonly
    • Kisses the wind its playment, some faint joy
    • Will thrill our dust, and we will be again fond
    • maid and boy.
    • And thus without life’s conscious torturing pain
    • In some sweet flower we will feel the sun,
    • And from the linnet’s throat will sing again,
    • And as two gorgeous-mailed snakes will run
    • Over our graves, or as two tigers creep
    • Through the hot jungle where the yellow-eyed huge
    • lions sleep
    • And give them battle! How my heart leaps up
    • To think of that grand living after death
    • In beast and bird and flower, when this cup,
    • Being filled too full of spirit, bursts for breath,
    • And with the pale leaves of some autumn day
    • The soul earth’s earliest conqueror becomes earth’s
    • last great prey.
    • O think of it! We shall inform ourselves
    • Into all sensuous life, the goat-foot Faun,
    • The Centaur, or the merry bright-eyed Elves
    • That leave their dancing rings to spite the dawn
    • Upon the meadows, shall not be more near
    • Than you and I to nature’s mysteries, for we shall hear
    • The thrush’s heart beat, and the daisies grow,
    • And the wan snowdrop sighing for the sun
    • On sunless days in winter, we shall know
    • By whom the silver gossamer is spun,
    • Who paints the diapered fritillaries,
    • On what wide wings from shivering pine
    • to pine the eagle flies.
    • Ay! had we never loved at all, who knows
    • If yonder daffodil had lured the bee
    • Into its gilded womb, or any rose
    • Had hung with crimson lamps its little tree!
    • Methinks no leaf would ever bud in spring,
    • But for the lovers’ lips that kiss, the poet’s
    • lips that sing.
    • Is the light vanished from our golden sun,
    • Or is this daedal-fashioned earth less fair,
    • That we are nature’s heritors, and one
    • With every pulse of life that beats the air?
    • Rather new suns across the sky shall pass,
    • New splendour come unto the flower, new glory
    • to the grass.
    • And we two lovers shall not sit afar,
    • Critics of nature, but the joyous sea
    • Shall be our raiment, and the bearded star
    • Shoot arrows at our pleasure! We shall be
    • Part of the mighty universal whole,
    • And through all aeons mix and mingle with
    • the Kosmic Soul!
    • We shall be notes in that great Symphony
    • Whose cadence circles through the rhythmic spheres,
    • And all the live World’s throbbing heart shall be
    • One with our heart, the stealthy creeping years
    • Have lost their terrors now, we shall not die,
    • The Universe itself shall be our Immortality!